Page:De Amicis - Heart, translation Hapgood, 1922.djvu/325

Rh, as he had not beheld it for a long time; he beheld it close to him, shining, speaking; he again beheld the most fleeting motions of her eyes, and of her lips, all her attitudes, all the shades of her thoughts; and urged on by these pursuing recollections, he hastened his steps. A new affection, an unspeakable tenderness, grew in him, grew in his heart, making sweet and quiet tears to flow down his face. As he advanced through the gloom, he spoke to her, he said to her the words which he would murmur in her ear in a little while more:—

“I am here, my mother; behold me here. I will never leave you again; we will return home together, and I will remain always beside you on board the ship, close beside you, and no one shall ever part me from you again, no one, never more, so long as I have life!”

And in the meantime he did not observe how the silvery light of the moon was dying away on the summits of the gigantic trees in the delicate whiteness of the dawn.

At eight o'clock on that morning, the doctor from Tucuman, a young Argentine, was already by the bedside of the sick woman, in company with an assistant, endeavoring, for the last time, to persuade her to permit herself to be operated on; and the engineer Mequinez and his wife added their warmest persuasions to those of the former. But all was in vain. The woman, feeling her strength exhausted, had no longer any faith in the operation; she was perfectly certain that she should die under it, or that she should only survive it a few hours, after having suffered in