Should he claim her by that tie of parentage?
Should he say to her, 'I, who stole your gold, I, who have a hundred murders on my soul, I, whose name the Maremma has shuddered at and gloried in, I am your father?'
He had been a selfish tyrant always; a brute, with little thought but for his own passions, his own greeds, his own revenge; seldom, since his earliest years, had he felt any single unselfish or generous impulse such as had moved him when he had found the grandson of Joconda sleeping in the snow; and the accursed life of the galleys, that scorches up every wellspring of feeling, and withers up every slender shoot of better instincts, had made him a devil rather than a man.
But now a movement of generosity, of self-sacrifice, stirred in him.
Better, he thought, better and kinder to leave her in ignorance for ever; better not to lean the weight of his own immeasurable guilt, of his own unutterable past, upon her. She had burden enough already.
It was the first instinct of any nobility, of
