The brilliant tertulia was just over, the last guests had departed, and the Senor Administrador had gone to his room already, when Dr Monygham, who had been expected in the evening but had not turned up, arrived driving along the wood-block pavement under the electric-lamps of the deserted Calle de la Constitucion, and found the great gateway of the casa still open.

He limped in, stumped up the stairs, and found the fat and sleek Basilio on the point of turning off the lights in the sala. The prosperous majordomo remained open-mouthed at this late invasion.

`Don't put out the lights,' commanded the doctor. `I want to see the senora.'

`The senora is in the Senor Administrador's cancillaria,' said Basilio, in an unctuous voice. `The Senor Administrador starts for the mountain in an hour. There is some trouble with the workmen to be feared, it appears. A shameless people without reason and decency. And idle, senor. Idle.'

`You are shamelessly lazy and imbecile yourself,' said the doctor, with that faculty for exasperation which made him so generally beloved. `Don't put the lights out.'

Basilio retired with dignity. Dr Monygham, waiting in the brilliantly lighted sala, heard presently a door close at the farther end of the house. A jingle of spurs died out. The Senor Administrador was off to the mountain.

With a measured swish of her long train, flashing with jewels and the shimmer of silk, her delicate head bowed as if under the weight of a mass of fair hair, in which the silver threads were lost, the `first lady of Sulaco', as Captain Mitchell used to describe her, moved along the lighted corridor, wealthy beyond great dreams of wealth, considered, loved, respected, honoured, and as solitary as any human being had ever been, perhaps, on this earth.

The doctor's `Mrs Gould! One minute!' stopped her with a start at the door of the lighted and empty sala. From the similarity of mood and circumstance, the sight of the doctor, standing there all alone amongst the groups of furniture, recalled to her emotional memory her unexpected meeting with Martin Decoud; she seemed to hear in the silence the voice of that man, dead miserably so many years ago, pronounce the words, `Antonia left her fan here.' But it was the doctor's voice that spoke, a little altered by his excitement. She remarked his shining eyes.

`Mrs Gould, you are wanted. Do you know what has happened? You remember what I told you yesterday about Nostromo. Well, it seems that a lancha, a decked boat, coming from Zapiga, with four Negroes in her, passing close to the Great Isabel, was hailed from the cliff by a woman's voice -- Linda's, as a matter of fact -- commanding them (it's a moonlight night) to go round to the beach and take up a wounded man to the town. The patron (from whom I've heard all this), of course, did so at once. He told me that when they got round to the low side of the Great Isabel, they found Linda Viola waiting for them. They followed her: she led them under a tree not far from the cottage. There they found Nostromo lying on the ground with his head in the younger girl's lap, and father Viola standing some distance off leaning on his gun. Under Linda's direction they got a table out of the cottage for a stretcher, after breaking off the legs. They are here, Mrs Gould. I mean Nostromo and -- and Giselle. The Negroes brought him in to the first-aid hospital near the harbour. He made the attendant send for me. But it is not me he wanted to see -- it was you, Mrs Gould! It was you.'

`Me?' whispered Mrs Gould, shrinking a little.

`Yes, you!' the doctor burst out. `He begged me -- his enemy, as he thinks -- to bring you to him at once. It seems he has something to say to you alone.'

`Impossible!' murmured Mrs Gould.