But how many other plans had not passed through his brain, without leaving any trace behind? In the course of his life he had dreamed of theft, murder, and rape. He had experienced imaginatively the criminal’s courage, strength, and perverse desires, he had even dreamed the results of his crime, above all that he should invariably escape punishment. But then he had had the double satisfaction of indulging in his dream and of discovering all the things he had wanted to destroy still intact, so that his senses were satisfied and his conscience at rest. He had committed a crime without any harmful result. But now that what he had dreamed and hoped for had actually materialized, he was as much astonished as if the dream had never been his; he could not even recognize it as his, so different was its aspect now from that under which he had known it.

“Aren’t you going to ask me who I am engaged to?” He pulled himself together with a sudden tremendous effort.

“Do you love him?”

“How can you ask me such a thing?” she cried in genuine astonishment. Her only reply was to kiss the hand which was holding the umbrella over her.

“Then don’t marry him!” he commanded. To himself his words seemed quite intelligible. She was his already; he did not desire her in any other way. Why must he give her up to someone else just in order to possess her more completely? Seeing her increasing astonishment he tried to argue with her. “You would never be happy with a man you did not love.”

But such scruples as his were unknown to her. For the first time she complained to him about her family. Her brothers did no work, her father was ill; how was it possible to make both ends meet? And it was none too cheerful at home. He had seen it in the most favorable light, when the boys were out. Directly they came home they began quarreling among themselves, and finding fault with their mother and sisters. Of course she wouldn’t have chosen the tailor Volpini for a husband if she could have got anyone better. But though he was forty, he was a decent man, kind and gentle enough, and she thought she might grow to be fond of him in time. How could she hope for anyone better? “You love me, I know, don’t you? But you never admit the possibility of marrying me.” He was very touched at hearing her allude to his egotism without the slightest resentment.

Yes, perhaps after all she was doing the best for herself. With his usual tendency to follow the line of least resistance, when he found himself unable to convince her he finally succeeded in convincing himself.

She told him she had got to know Volpini at the Deluigis. He was a tiny little man: “He only comes up to here,” she said laughing, and pointing to her shoulder. “He is a jolly little man. He says he may be small, but that his love is big.” Suspecting perhaps—but in this instance quite without cause—that Emilio might be feeling jealous, she hastened to add: “He is fearfully ugly. His face is covered all over with hair the color of straw. His beard reaches right up to his eyes, even up to his eyebrows.” Volpini’s business was at Fiume, but he had told her that when they were married he would allow her to spend one day a week in Trieste, and till then, as he was away most of the time, they would be able to go on seeing each other in peace, just as before.

“But we must be very careful,” he insisted. “Very careful indeed,” he repeated. If it really was a good thing for her, wouldn’t it be better to give up seeing her altogether, then and there, so as not to compromise her in any way? He felt himself capable of any sacrifice which should quiet his uneasy conscience. He took her hand and held it against his forehead, and in that attitude of adoration told her all that was in his mind: “I would give you up altogether rather than that any harm should happen to you through me.”

Perhaps she understood him; in any case she made no further allusion to the treason they had plotted together, and that fact alone would have made this evening one of the most charming they had spent together. For once only, and for one short hour, she seemed to have risen to the level of Emilio’s feeling for her. She struck no false note, she did not even once tell him she loved him. He was able to nurse his grief secretly. The woman he loved was not only sweet and unprotected: she was a lost woman.