ITALIAN PLAYS AND PLAYWRIGHTS 119

But the poor convict is, little by little, oppressed with the
hopelessness of the task which he has set himself. Little
by little, the ties that formed themselves for others
during his fourteen years' seclusion, become impassable
realities to his dreaming eyes ; he sees that the rights of
property, his by law, have passed to others by prescrip-
tion. That by no one is he loved, by none desired, save
by a priest with whose tenets he is out of ssmipathy,
and whose methods he abhors. Seeing that his own, his
only hope of happiness, has failed him in life, he takes
the speediest way out of it : and while his child, his
own flesh and blood, is saying a prayer in pity for the
uncouth and terrifying stranger, he takes poison and falls
dead behind her back.
