up to California, to Los Angeles or to San Francisco. Suddenly escape, and flee away to a white man’s country, where she could once more breathe freely. How good it would be!—Yes, this was what she would do.
The night grew late, the drum ceased, she heard Ezequiel come home and lie down on the mattress outside her door. The only sound was the hoarse crowing of cocks in the moonlit night. And in her room, like someone striking a match, came the greenish light of a firefly, intermittent, now here, now there.
Thoroughly uneasy and cowed, she went to sleep. But then she slept deeply.
And curiously enough, she awoke in the morning with a new feeling of strength. It was six o’clock, the sun was making yellow pencils through her shutter-cracks. She threw open her window to the street, and looked through the iron grating at the little lane with deep shadow under the garden wall, and above the wall, banana leaves fraying translucent green, and shaggy mops of palm-trees perching high, towards the twin white tower-tips of the church, crowned by the Greek cross with four equal arms.
In the lane it was already motion: big cows marching slowly to the lake, under the bluish shadow of the wall, and a small calf, big-eyed and adventurous, trotting aside to gaze through her gate at the green watered grass and the flowers. The silent peon, following, lifted his two arms with a sudden swoop upwards, noiselessly, and the calf careered on. Only the sound of the feet of calves.
Then two boys vainly trying to urge a young bull-calf to the