The question remained, were those beings still in being? Antonio never even put that question to himself. Vengeance is timeless. For all those twenty years of elsewise obliteration, the lust for it was as red in him at this day as when he had heard himself convicted on false evidence of a heinous offence, and had vainly striven, a foreigner and incoherent, to explain to the Court the real purport of a villain’s traducing. He could not believe for an instant that the God of his superstition had let the work of his legitimate hands be anticipated by another. No; the men remained to him somewhere. Only to find them! I do not ask your sympathy for this Antonio Geoletti. If he had been convicted unjustly, he had been purposing a crime at the moment which merited a just conviction. He may have got his deserts indirectly; though, to be sure, there was no automatic standard for apportioning its exact term of punishment to either offence. The measures of the law are not even comparative measures, and many men all over the land are suffering under widely different sentences for a like crime. Only, self-consciousness of one evil-doing does not reconcile one to punishment for an imaginary other. That is human nature; and for all the moral purposes of this record, Antonio felt himself the divinely commissioned, though long wickedly withheld, minister of retribution. But at last his time was come. It was the sense, the indelible haunting of this obligation which upheld him through all the terrific experience of his first re-emergence into the arena of living things. The pale November sunlight smote upon his eyes like the blast from a sudden-opened furnace; the speech of free people struck him as almost a sacrilege, being uttered unconcerned in this boundless temple of God’s own liberty; he blinked and staggered like a disentombed miner. The prison frowned behind him; the island with its quarries smiled before. How often had he cursed those indurate blocks, symbols of the system to which he appealed in vain--thrown down his ringing tools upon them in a monstrous rage of helplessness, and turned to find a warder’s gun barrel at his head! Now they lay in the mist as soft as fairy bales, all their sinister weight drawn out of them, objects potentially suggestive of the noble fabrics in which each was to have its place. He heard a robin singing, and his eyes came wet with tears. Sobbing, God help him, like a woman, and always, and never changing, with that dream of blood in his heart, he crept out into the world. How beautiful a thing it was, apart from its people! He had forgotten how soft the sunlight lay on it, how green the grass could grow, how fathomless was the blue of heaven. Limit and close obstruction were all he had known for so long. Even the daily tramp to the quarries had entailed a guard on speech and sight. Now he was free to gaze to drunkenness; to sing, if he would.