frizzling of fat had stopped, the fumes floated upwards in sunshine,
a strong smell of burnt onions hung in the drowsy heat, enveloping the
house; and the eye lost itself in a vast flat expanse of grass to the
west, as if the plain between the Sierra overtopping Sulaco and the
coast range away there towards Esmeralda had been as big as half the
world.

Signora Teresa, after an impressive pause, remonstrated--

"Eh, Giorgio! Leave Cavour alone and take care of yourself now we are
lost in this country all alone with the two children, because you cannot
live under a king."

And while she looked at him she would sometimes put her hand hastily
to her side with a short twitch of her fine lips and a knitting of
her black, straight eyebrows like a flicker of angry pain or an angry
thought on her handsome, regular features.

It was pain; she suppressed the twinge. It had come to her first a few
years after they had left Italy to emigrate to America and settle at
last in Sulaco after wandering from town to town, trying shopkeeping
in a small way here and there; and once an organized enterprise of
fishing--in Maldonado--for Giorgio, like the great Garibaldi, had been a
sailor in his time.

Sometimes she had no patience with pain. For years its gnawing had been
part of the landscape embracing the glitter of the harbour under
the wooded spurs of the range; and the sunshine itself was heavy and
dull--heavy with pain--not like the sunshine of her girlhood, in which
middle-aged Giorgio had wooed her gravely and passionately on the shores