Page 414 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

senora had given into her charge the girls belonging to that
Italian posadero. She, Leonarda, had put them to bed in
her own room. The fair girl had cried herself to sleep, but
the dark one—the bigger—had not closed her eyes yet. She
sat up in bed clutching the sheets right up under her chin
and staring before her like a little witch. Leonarda did not
approve of the Viola 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
senora, she must be asleep. Ever since she had gone into her
room after seeing the departure of Dona 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. He hobbled 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 haphazard
amongst the chairs and tables till Mrs. Gould, enveloped in
a morning wrapper, came in rapidly.
‘You know that I never approved of the silver being sent
away,’ the doctor began at once, as a preliminary to the nar-
rative 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

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