to tin- vi-ry door by the good-natured engineer-in-

chii-i, had re-rtiUTfl his house, which he had been almost at tlic very moment of his wife's i. All was still. The lamp above was burning, nearly called out to her by name; and the thought that no call from him would ever again evoke the an- r of her voice made him drop heavily into the chair with a loud groan, wrung out by the pain, as of a Made piercing his breast. The rest of the night he made no sound. The dark- turned to gray, and on the colorless, clear, glassy n the jagged sierra stood out flat and opaque, as

t out of paper.

The enthusiastic and severe soul of Giorgio Viola, "sailor, champion of oppressed humanity, enemy of Kings, and, by the grace of Mrs. Gould, hotel-keeper -niluco harbor, had descended into the open abyss Hi" desolation among the shattered vestiges of

.ast. He remembered his wooing between two

campaigns, a single short week in the season of gather- ing olives. Nothing approached the grave passion of that time but the deep, passionate sense of his bereave- ment. He discovered all the extent of his dependence uj">n the silenced voice of that woman. It was her that he missed. Abstracted, busy, lost in in- 1 contemplation, he seldom looked at his wife in later years. The thought of his girls was a mat- >f concern, not of consolation. It was her voice that he wouKl miss. And he remembered the other fluid the little boy who died at sea. Ah! a man would have been something to lean upon. And, alas!

even Gian* Battista he of whom and of Linda his