"
"Put me ashore, Gaspare."
"Si, Signore."
The boat passed before the fa?ade of the palace.
Artois knew the palace well by day. This was the first time he had
come to it by night. In daylight it was a small and picturesque ruin
washed by the laughing sea, lonely but scarcely sad. Leaping from its
dark and crumbling walls the fisher-boys often plunged into the depths
below; or they lay upon the broad sills of the gaping window-spaces to
dry themselves in the sun. Men came with rods and lines to fish from
its deserted apartments, through which, when rough weather was at
hand, the screaming sea-birds flew. The waves played frivolously
enough in its recesses. And their voices were heard against the slimy
and defiant stones calling to teach other merrily, as perhaps once the
voices of revellers long dead called in the happy hours of a vanished
villeggiatura.
But the night wrought on it, in it, and about it change. Its solitude
then became desolation, the darkness of its stones a blackness that
was tragic, its ruin more than a suggestion, the decisive picture of
despair.
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