His two girls, the eldest fourteen, and the other two years younger,
crouched on the sanded floor, on each side of the Signora Teresa, with
their heads on their mother's lap, both scared, but each in her own
way, the dark-haired Linda indignant and angry, the fair Giselle, the
younger, bewildered and resigned. The Patrona removed her arms, which
embraced her daughters, for a moment to cross herself and wring her
hands hurriedly. She moaned a little louder.

"Oh! Gian' Battista, why art thou not here? Oh! why art thou not here?"

She was not then invoking the saint himself, but calling upon Nostromo,
whose patron he was. And Giorgio, motionless on the chair by her side,
would be provoked by these reproachful and distracted appeals.

"Peace, woman! Where's the sense of it? There's his duty," he murmured
in the dark; and she would retort, panting--

"Eh! I have no patience. Duty! What of the woman who has been like a
mother to him? I bent my knee to him this morning; don't you go out,
Gian' Battista--stop in the house, Battistino--look at those two little
innocent children!"

Mrs. Viola was an Italian, too, a native of Spezzia, and though
considerably younger than her husband, already middle-aged. She had a
handsome face, whose complexion had turned yellow because the climate
of Sulaco did not suit her at all. Her voice was a rich contralto. When,
with her arms folded tight under her ample bosom, she scolded the squat,
thick-legged China girls handling linen, plucking fowls, pounding corn
in wooden mortars amongst the mud outbuildings at the back of the house,
she could bring out such an impassioned, vibrating, sepulchral note that