He named her to
me, for the first time, a day or two before that happened: a piece of
confidence so unprecedented, that I must have been blind, indeed, not
to have foreseen what it prefaced. I had seen her face the first time I
entered his house, where her photograph hung on a conspicuous wall: the
charming, oval face of a young girl, little more than a child, with great
eyes, that one guessed, one knew not why, to be the colour of violets,
looking out with singular wistfulness from a waving cloud of dark hair.
Afterwards, he told me that it was the picture of his _fiancee_: but,
before that, signs had not been wanting by which I had read a woman in his
life.
Iquique is not Paris; it is not even Valparaiso; but it is a city of
civilisation; and but two days' ride from the pestilential stew, where
we nursed our lives doggedly on quinine and hope, the ultimate hope of
evasion. The lives of most Englishmen yonder, who superintend works in the
interior, are held on the same tenure: you know them by a certain savage,
hungry look in their eyes. In the meantime, while they wait for their luck,
most of them are glad enough when business calls them down for a day or
two to Iquique.
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