have come down if her husband
had been made acquainted with the news brought by Decoud, had been in
a roundabout way nearly the cause of Dr. Monygham's death. And these
things appeared to her very dreadful.

"Was it lost, though?" the doctor exclaimed. "I've always felt that
there was a mystery about our Nostromo ever since. I do believe he wants
now, at the point of death----"

"The point of death?" repeated Mrs. Gould.

"Yes. Yes. . . . He wants perhaps to tell you something concerning that
silver which----"

"Oh, no! No!" exclaimed Mrs. Gould, in a low voice. "Isn't it lost and
done with? Isn't there enough treasure without it to make everybody in
the world miserable?"

The doctor remained still, in a submissive, disappointed silence. At
last he ventured, very low--

"And there is that Viola girl, Giselle. What are we to do? It looks as
though father and sister had----"

Mrs. Gould admitted that she felt in duty bound to do her best for these
girls.

"I have a volante here," the doctor said. "If you don't mind getting
into that----"

He waited, all impatience, till Mrs. Gould reappeared, having thrown
over her dress a grey cloak with a deep hood.

It was thus that, cloaked and monastically hooded over her evening
costume, this woman, full of endurance and compassion, stood by the side
of the bed on which the splendid Capataz de Cargadores lay stretched
out motionless on his back. The whiteness of sheets and pillows gave a
sombre and energetic relief to his bronzed face, to the dark, nervous
hands, so good on a tiller, upon a bridle and on a trigger, lying open
and idle upon a white coverlet.

"She is innocent," the Capataz was saying in a deep and level voice, as
though afraid that a louder word would break the slender hold his
spirit still kept upon his body. "She is innocent. It is I alone. But no
matter. For these things I would answer to no man or woman alive."

He paused. Mrs. Gould's face, very white within the shadow of the hood,
bent over him with an invincible and dreary sadness. And the low sobs
of Giselle Viola, kneeling at the end of the bed, her gold hair with
coppery gleams loose and scattered over the Capataz's feet, hardly
troubled the silence of the room.

"Ha! Old Giorgio--the guardian of thine honour! Fancy the Vecchio coming
upon me so light of foot, so steady of aim. I myself could have done no
better. But the price of a charge of powder might have been saved. The
honour was saf