surprised.  He smiled that dark smile of his, which may mean gratitude or murder.  He looked at Teresa.  She sprung up from her seat, and let her peaches fall from her lap on the deck.  She put her little hands on mine—­the tears were in her pretty blue eyes.  ‘You are a good man,’ she said.  ’Some woman must love you very much!’ Yes—­she said that.  And she was right.  Our Lady be praised for it!”

And his dark eyes glanced upward with a devout gesture of thanksgiving.  I looked at him with a sort of jealous hunger gnawing at my heart.  Here was another self deluded fool—­a fond wretch feasting on the unsubstantial food of a pleasant dream—­a poor dupe who believed in the truth of woman!

“You are a happy man,” I said with a forced smile; “you have a guiding star for your life as well as for your boat—­a woman that loves you and is faithful? is it so?”

He answered me directly and simply, raising his cap slightly as he did so.

“Yes, signor—­my mother.”

I was deeply touched by his naive and unexpected reply—­more deeply than I cared to show.  A bitter regret stirred in my soul—­why, oh, why had my mother died so young!  Why had I never known the sacred joy that seemed to vibrate through the frame, and sparkle in the eyes of this common sailor!  Why must I be forever alone, with a curse of a woman’s lie on my life, weighing me down to the dust and ashes of a desolate despair!  Something in my face must have spoken my thoughts, for the captain said, gently: 

“The signor has no mother?”

“She died when I was but a child,” I answered, briefly.

The Sicilian puffed lightly at his cigarette in silence—­the silence of an evident compassion.  To relieve him of his friendly embarrassment, I said: 

“You spoke of Teresa?  Who is Teresa?”

“Ah, you may well ask, signor!  No one knows who she is; she loves Carmelo Neri, and there all is said.  Such a little thing she is—­so delicate! like a foam-bell on the waves; and Carmelo—­You have seen Carmelo, signor?”

I shook my head in the negative.

“Ebbene!  Carmelo is big and rough and black like a wolf of the forests, all hair and fangs; Teresa is, well! you have seen a little cloud in the sky at night, wandering past the moon all flecked with pale gold?—­that is Teresa.  She is, small and slight as a child; she has rippling curls, and soft praying eyes, and tiny, weak, white hands, not strong enough to snap a twig in two.  Yet she can do anything with Carmelo—­she is the one soft spot in his life.”

“I wonder if she is true to him,” I muttered, half to myself and half aloud.

The captain caught up my words with an accent of surprise.

“True to him?  Ah, Dio! but the signor does not know her.  There was one of Carmelo’s own band, as bold and handsome a cut-throat as ever lived—­he was mad for Teresa—­he followed her everywhere like a beaten cur.  One day he found her alone; he tried to embrace her—­she snatched a knife from his own girdle and stabbed him with it, like a little fury!  She did not kill him then, but Carmelo did afterward.  To think of a little woman like that with such a devil in her!  It is her boast that no man, save Carmelo, has ever touched so much as a ringlet of her hair.  Ay; she is true to him—­more’s the pity.”