Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard
them to bed in her own room. The fair girl had cried herself to sleep, hut the dark one. the biggest, had not, closed her eyes yet. She sat up in bed clutching the sheets right up under her chin ami staring before her like a little witch. Leonarda did not approve of the children being admitted to the house. She made this feeling clear by the indifferent tone in which she inquired whether their mother was dead yet. As to the señora, she must be asleep. Ever since she had gone into her room after seeing the departure of Doña Antonia with her dying father, there had been no sound behind her door.
The doctor, rousing himself out of profound reflection, told her abruptly to call her mistress at once. lobbied off to wait for Mrs. Gould in the sala. He was very tired, but too excited to sit down. In this great drawing-room, now empty, in which his withered soul had been refreshed after many arid years and his outcast spirit had accepted silently the toleration of many side glances, he wandered hap-hazard among the chairs and table, still Mrs Gould, enveloped in a morning wrapper, came in rapidly.
"You know that I never approved of the silver being away," the doctor began at once, as a preliminary
to the narrative of his night's adventures in association with Captain Mitchell, the engineer-in-chief, and old Viola at Sotillo's headquarters. To the doctor, with his special conception of this political crisis, the removal of the silver had seemed an irrational and ill-omened measure. It was as if a general were sending the best part of his troops away on the eve of battle upon some recondite pretext. The whole lot of in-
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