have been loved, too," Mrs. Gould said in a severe tone.

Giselle clung to her convulsively. "Oh, senora, but you shall live
adored to the end of your life," she sobbed out.

Mrs. Gould kept an unbroken silence till the carriage arrived. She
helped in the half-fainting girl. After the doctor had shut the door of
the landau, she leaned over to him.

"You can do nothing?" she whispered.

"No, Mrs. Gould. Moreover, he won't let us touch him. It does not
matter. I just had one look. . . . Useless."

But he promised to see old Viola and the other girl that very night. He
could get the police-boat to take him off to the island. He remained
in the street, looking after the landau rolling away slowly behind the
white mules.

The rumour of some accident--an accident to Captain Fidanza--had been
spreading along the new quays with their rows of lamps and the dark
shapes of towering cranes. A knot of night prowlers--the poorest of the
poor--hung about the door of the first-aid hospital, whispering in the
moonlight of the empty street.

There was no one with the wounded man but the pale photographer, small,
frail, bloodthirsty, the hater of capitalists, perched on a high stool
near the head of the bed with his knees up and his chin in his hands. He
had been fetched by a comrade who, working late on the wharf, had
heard from a negro belonging to a lancha, that Captain Fidanza had been
brought ashore mortally wounded.

"Have you any dispositions to make, comrade?" he asked, anxiously. "Do
not forget that we want money for our work. The rich must be fought with
their own weapons."

Nostromo made no answer. The other did not insist, remaining huddled
up on the stool, shock-headed, wildly hairy, like a hunchbacked monkey.
Then, after a long silence--

"Comrade Fidanza," he began, solemnly, "you have refused all aid from
that doctor. Is he really a dangerous enemy of the people?"

In the dimly lit room Nostromo rolled his head slowly on the pillow and
opened his eyes, directing at the weird figure perched by his bedside a
glance of enigmatic and profound inquiry. Then his head rolled back, his
eyelids fell, and the Capataz de Cargadores died without a word or moan
after an hour of immobility, broken by short shudders testifying to the
most atrocious sufferings.

Dr. Monygham, going out in the police-galley to the islands, beheld the
glitter of the moon upon the gulf and the high black shape of the Great
Isabel sending a sh