,
Giovanni, my lover. I am coming."

His prudent footsteps stopped, and with his eyes glistening wildly, he
spoke in a harsh voice:

"Not yet. I must grow rich slowly." . . . A threatening note came into
his tone. "Do not forget that you have a thief for your lover."

"Yes! Yes!" she whispered, hastily. "Come nearer! Listen! Do not give me
up, Giovanni! Never, never! . . . I will be patient! . . ."

Her form drooped consolingly over the low casement towards the slave of
the unlawful treasure. The light in the room went out, and weighted with
silver, the magnificent Capataz clasped her round her white neck in the
darkness of the gulf as a drowning man clutches at a straw.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

On the day Mrs. Gould was going, in Dr. Monygham's words, to "give a
tertulia," Captain Fidanza went down the side of his schooner lying in
Sulaco harbour, calm, unbending, deliberate in the way he sat down
in his dinghy and took up his sculls. He was later than usual. The
afternoon was well advanced before he landed on the beach of the Great
Isabel, and with a steady pace climbed the slope of the island.

From a distance he made out Giselle sitting in a chair tilted back
against the end of the house, under the window of the girl's room. She
had her embroidery in her hands, and held it well up to her eyes. The
tranquillity of that girlish figure exasperated the feeling of perpetual
struggle and strife he carried in his breast. He became angry. It seemed
to him that she ought to hear the clanking of his fetters--his silver
fetters, from afar. And while ashore that day, he had met the doctor
with the evil eye, who had looked at him very hard.

The raising of her eyes mollified him. They smiled in their flower-like
freshness straight upon his heart. Then she frowned. It was a warning to
be cautious. He stopped some distance away, and in a loud, indifferent
tone, said--

"Good day, Giselle. Is Linda up yet?"

"Yes. She is in the big room with father."

He approached then, and, looking through the window into the bedroom
for fear of being detected by Linda returning there for some reason, he
said, moving only his lips--

"You love me?"

"More than my life." She went on with her embroidery under his
contemplating gaze and continued to speak, looking at her work, "Or I
could not live. I could not, Giovanni. For this life is like death. Oh,
Giovanni, I shall perish if you do not take me away."

He smiled carelessly. "I w