Quotation from: Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard

Written by: Joseph Conrad

"It may have been a vision."

"No," he said, softly. "It is no vision, old man."

A strong chest voice asked in the dark--

"Is that you I hear, Giovann' Battista?"

"Si, viejo. Steady. Not so loud."

After his release by Sotillo, Giorgio Viola, attended to the very door
by the good-natured engineer-in-chief, had reentered his house, which
he had been made to leave almost at the very moment of his wife's death.
All was still. The lamp above was burning. He nearly called out to her
by name; and the thought that no call from him would ever again evoke
the answer of her voice, made him drop heavily into the chair with
a loud groan, wrung out by the pain as of a keen blade piercing his
breast.