When Nostromo hesitated in proposing to Giselle, we were told that he belonged to "the unlawfulness" of his situation. Here it is precisely the quality of unlawfulness that he is trying to escape from. The victory, that seems to be "stronger than the accursed spell of the treasure," is the victory of love over law. Giselle's continued love, after his confession of crime, constitiutes the essence of the socialist utopia: the vanishing of property relations into human acceptance.

Beneath his exultation, however, the narrator is still audible, telling us that Nostromo's sense of freedom is "unwonted," i.e., that we are not to take his victory or his following promises at face value. The caution is emphasized by the dramatic change in lighting, in which the seeming noonday blaze has suddenly become "the densest blackness of the Placid Gulf," signaling, as we well know by now, the plunge into subjective desire and the loss of all objective reference. The darkness is not lifted by Giselle's response.