Her color rose, and she did not withdraw her shapely hand when Emilio impressed a chaste kiss upon it.

They remained standing a long time on the terrace of S. Andrea, looking out over the calm sea with the glow of sunset still upon it under a clear, starry sky. Though there was no moon the night was not dark. A cart drove by on the road below, and in the great silence which surrounded them the distant sound of wheels over the uneven ground reached them long after it had passed. They amused themselves by trying to catch the sound as it became more and more distant, till it melted at last into the universal silence, and it pleased them that they both lost the sound at the same moment. “Our ears agree well together,” said Emilio with a smile.

He had said all he had to say and did not feel inclined to talk any more just then. It was only after a long interval that he broke silence by saying: “I wonder whether this meeting will bring us good luck.” He was quite sincere. He felt the need to express aloud the doubt he entertained as to his own future happiness.

“I wonder,” she replied, trying to convey in her own voice the emotion she had felt in his. Emilio smiled again, but thought it more becoming to hide his smile. Given the premises from which he had started, what sort of good luck could come to Angiolina from knowing him?

At last it was time for them to part. She did not want him to be seen with her in the town, so he followed slowly at a distance, unable wholly to tear himself away from her. How charming she looked, as she walked along in all the assurance of her splendid youth, never faltering, though the pavement was covered with a slippery mud! There was something of a wild beast’s beauty in her strong and graceful carriage.

As luck would have it, the very next day he learned a good deal more about Angiolina than she had told him herself.

He met her by chance in the Corso, at midday, and greeted her with all the enthusiasm of delighted surprise, almost sweeping the ground with his hat in a magnificent gesture of salutation: she replied with a slight inclination of the head, enhanced however by a brilliant glance of her flashing eyes.

Someone named Sorniani, a thin, shriveled little creature, reputed to be a great ladies’ man and also a malicious gossip, touched Emilio on the arm and asked him where on earth he had got to know that girl. They had been friends since childhood, but it was several years since they had spoken to each other and it was only the sight of a pretty woman that had made Sorniani feel the need for renewing their former acquaintance. “I met her at some friends of mine,” replied Emilio.

“And what is she doing now?” asked Sorniani, in a tone which implied that he knew all about Angiolina’s past, and was quite injured at knowing nothing about her life at the moment.

“I have no idea,” answered Emilio, adding, with well-feigned indifference: “She strikes me as being a very nice sort of girl.”

“Don’t be too sure,” exclaimed Sorniani emphatically, as if he would have liked to assert the contrary; it was only after a short pause that he corrected himself. “I know nothing at all about her now, and at the time I knew her everyone seemed to think her quite respectable, though once she had been in a rather equivocal situation.”

It needed no encouragement on Emilio’s part for him to relate that the poor girl had been within an ace of a great stroke of good fortune which, perhaps by no fault of her own, had turned out very badly for her. When she was scarcely more than a child, a certain Merighi had fallen madly in love with her. He was an extremely handsome fellow, that Sorniani was obliged to admit, though he had never liked him personally, and he was a very prosperous man of business. His intentions towards her were perfectly honest. He had removed her from her family, of whom he did not think very highly, and had insisted on his own mother adopting the girl. “His own mother!” cried Sorniani. “As if the idiot could not have enjoyed the girl outside his own house, but must needs do it under his mother’s very nose.” He was bent on proving the man to be a fool and the woman dishonest. In a few months time Angiolina returned to her own home, which she ought never to have come out of, and Merighi and his mother left the town, giving out that they had lost a good deal of money over an unlucky speculation. But some people gave a rather different account of what had happened. Merighi’s mother was said to have discovered that Angiolina was carrying on a disgraceful intrigue with someone else and to have turned her out of the house. Sorniani volunteered, unasked, other variations on the same theme.

He took an evident pleasure in enlarging on so spicy a subject, and Brentani only paid attention to such of his words as seemed to be worthy of credence, facts which must be notorious to everyone. He had known Merighi by sight and remembered very well his tall, athletic figure, obviously the perfect mate for Angiolina. He remembered having heard him favorably spoken of as an idealistic businessman, rather too daring in his conceptions; a man who was convinced that he could conquer the world by his energy alone. He had also heard from people connected with him in business that Merighi’s lofty ideals had cost him dear, and that he had in the end been obliged to liquidate his knowledge under the most unfavorable conditions. But Sorniani might as well have talked to the winds, for Emilio was now sure that he knew exactly what had happened. Merighi, impoverished and discredited, had lacked the courage to embark on matrimony, and Angiolina, who was to have been made into the respectable wife of a rich bourgeois, had ended by becoming a plaything in his own hands.