It was too late then to remove his family, and, indeed, where could he have run to with the portly Signora Teresa and two little girls on that great plain?
So, barricading every opening, the old man sat down sternly in the middle of the darkened cafe with an old shot-gun on his knees.

His wife sat on another chair by his side, muttering pious invocations to all the saints of the calendar.
The old republican did not believe in saints, or in prayers, or in what he called "priest's religion." Liberty and Garibaldi were his divinities; but he tolerated "superstition" in women, preserving in these matters a lofty and silent attitude.
His two girls, the eldest fourteen, and the other two years younger, crouched on the sanded floor, on each side of the Signora Teresa, with their heads on their mother's lap, both scared, but each in her own way, the dark-haired Linda indignant and angry, the fair Giselle, the younger, bewildered and resigned.

The Patrona removed her arms, which embraced her daughters, for a moment to cross herself and wring her hands hurriedly.

She moaned a little louder.
"Oh! Gian' Battista, why art thou not here?
Oh! why art thou not here ?" She was not then invoking the saint himself, but calling upon Nostromo, whose patron he was.

And Giorgio, motionless on the chair by her side, would be provoked by these reproachful and distracted appeals.
"Peace, woman! Where's the sense of it?
There's his duty," he murmured in the dark; and she would retort, panting-- "Eh! I have no patience.