There was the galley-slave on Gorgona, and there was the wild blood in the stormbird. The only good, she thought, she could wish for the daughter of Saturnino was to live without sin in this desolate spot, unseen, unknown, with little more soul in her than there was in the stout shore thistle, that neither sands nor sea could swamp.
'So, the saints will pluck her to themselves at last,' thought Joconda; and the dreariness, the lovelessness, the hopelessness of such an existence did not occur to her, because age, which has learned the solace and sweetness of peace, never remembers that to youth peace seems only stagnation, inanition, death.
The exhausted swimmer, reaching the land, falls prone on it, and blesses it; but the out-going swimmer, full of strength, spurns the land, and only loves the high-crested wave, the abyss of the deep sea.
There were seventy-one years between the souls of Joconda and the child who slept in her bed, sat at her board, and knelt before her cross. They were too many for sympathy to bridge them, and though she loved the child, behind the love was always fear: the human fear of the tiger's cub.
