"Where is the rest?"
"Gone."
Nancy sat down on the bed near Anne-Marie. There was a long silence.
Aldo fidgeted, and said: "I told you the systems were all wrong."
Nancy did not answer. She was thinking. She understood nothing about money, but she knew what this meant. How were they to go back to Milan? How were they to live? With her mother? Her mother had had to scrape and be careful since the forty thousand francs had been given to Aldo. She had brought smaller boxes of chocolate to Anne-Marie. She took no cabs, and was wearing a last year's cloak of Aunt Carlotta's. Aunt Carlotta herself was always grumbling that when she wanted to spend five francs she turned them over three times, and then put them into her purse again, and that Adèle could not find a husband because her dot was small, and men asked for nothing but money nowadays. There was Zio Giacomo, dear, grumpy old man. But he had all Nino's old debts to pay, and everybody was always borrowing from him. Distant relations and seedy old friends visited and wrote to him periodically; and Zio Giacomo was enraged, and always vowed that this would be the last time.... The only wealthy person connected with the family was Aldo's brother, Carlo. But Nancy knew that Aldo had exhausted all from that source. What would happen? What were they going to do? She looked at Aldo, who sat in the arm-chair, with his head thrown back and his eyes on the ceiling. He knew she had likened him to San Sebastian, and now to move her pity as much as possible he assumed the expression of the adolescent saint pierced with arrows.
Nancy turned her eyes from him. The sight of him irritated her beyond endurance. She looked at Anne-Marie, sitting good and happy beside her, playing with the doll. She bent and kissed the child's cool pink cheek.
Aldo sat up, and said: "I had better go."
"Where to?" said Nancy.
"To the Casino, of course," said Aldo. "I promised to be there at twelve-thirty."
"To meet that woman?"