ive way to the enviousness of
your sister's lot," he admonished her, very grave, in his deep voice.

Presently he had to come to the door again to call in his younger
daughter. It was late. He shouted her name three times before she
even moved her head. Left alone, she had become the helpless prey of
astonishment. She walked into the bedroom she shared with Linda like
a person profoundly asleep. That aspect was so marked that even old
Giorgio, spectacled, raising his eyes from the Bible, shook his head as
she shut the door behind her.

She walked right across the room without looking at anything, and sat
down at once by the open window. Linda, stealing down from the tower in
the exuberance of her happiness, found her with a lighted candle at her
back, facing the black night full of sighing gusts of wind and the sound
of distant showers--a true night of the gulf, too dense for the eye of
God and the wiles of the devil. She did not turn her head at the opening
of the door.

There was something in that immobility which reached Linda in the depths
of her paradise. The elder sister guessed angrily: the child is
thinking of that wretched Ramirez. Linda longed to talk. She said in
her arbitrary voice, "Giselle!" and was not answered by the slightest
movement.

The girl that was going to live in a palace and walk on ground of her
own was ready to die with terror. Not for anything in the world would
she have turned her head to face her sister. Her heart was beating
madly. She said with subdued haste--

"Do not speak to me. I am praying."

Linda, disappointed, went out quietly; and Giselle sat on unbelieving,
lost, dazed, patient, as if waiting for the confirmation of the
incredible. The hopeless blackness of the clouds seemed part of a dream,
too. She waited.

She did not wait in vain. The man whose soul was dead within him,
creeping out of the ravine, weighted with silver, had seen the gleam
of the lighted window, and could not help retracing his steps from the
beach.

On that impenetrable background, obliterating the lofty mountains by
the seaboard, she saw the slave of the San Tome silver, as if by
an extraordinary power of a miracle. She accepted his return as if
henceforth the world could hold no surprise for all eternity.

She rose, compelled and rigid, and began to speak long before the light
from within fell upon the face of the approaching man.

"You have come back to carry me off. It is well! Open thy arms