Nancy packed his trunk for him, and felt pity and half remorse as she folded his limp, well-known clothes, his helpless coats and defenceless waistcoats, and put them away. He had no character. It was not his fault. She ought not to have allowed him to come here. He was not a wall; Clarissa had told her so long ago. He was weak, and limp, and foolish. Well, Nancy would be the wall. Already she knew what to do. Say the Casino gave them back three or four thousand francs. They would go back to Milan, give up the home in Via Senato, and take a cheaper apartment in the Quartieri Nuovi. She would write. She would work again. Ah! at the thought of her work her blood quickened. The baby should stay with Valeria, because it was impossible to do any serious work with Anne-Marie tugging at one's skirts and at one's heart-strings. She would go and see the baby every evening after she had written five or six hours. Aldo would return to Zio Giacomo's office. Good old Zio Giacomo would be glad to take him back for Valeria's and Nancy's sake, and they would live quietly and modestly. Aldo should superintend the household expenses, and squabble over the bills with the servant—he loved to do that; and by the time the three, or four, or five thousand francs that the Casino had given them were finished The Book would be out. "The Cycle of Lyrics" had brought her in twenty thousand francs, and it was only a slender volume of verse. This book would make a great stir in Italy—she knew it—and it would be translated into all languages. She wished she had the manuscript here. She felt that she could start it again at once.
She closed her eyes and remembered. All the people she had created, bound together by the scarlet thread of the conception, rushed out from the neglected pages, and entered her heart again. She felt like Browning's lion; you could see by her eye, wide and steady, she was leagues in the desert already....
Suddenly Anne-Marie, who had been playing like a little lamb of gold on the balcony, gave a scream: the doll had gone. The doll had fallen over the balcony. It was gone! It was dead! Nancy looked over the ledge. Yes, there lay the Condamine doll on the gravel-path in the garden. And it was dead. Half of its face had jumped away and lay some distance off.
Aldo, entering the garden at that moment, saw it, and picked it up. Then he looked up at the balcony, and saw Nancy's troubled face and the distracted countenance of his little daughter.
He waved his hand, and went out again, taking the dead doll with him. He hailed a carriage, and told the driver to drive quickly to the Condamine. He bought the doll with the real eyelashes for twenty-two francs—he made them knock off six francs—and returned with clatter of horses and cracking of whip to the hotel.
When Anne-Marie saw the doll, and when Nancy saw Anne-Marie's face, Aldo knew he was forgiven and reinstated.
"What have they given you back at the Casino?" asked Nancy.
"I don't know. I am to go again in two hours," said Aldo. "Let us have luncheon."
They had an excellent luncheon, for, confronted with a desperate situation in which the economizing of fifty centimes meant nothing, the ancestral shopkeeper in Aldo's veins bowed, and left room for the lazzarone, who ate his spaghetti to-day, and troubled not about the morrow.
"If they give you five or six thousand francs, I suppose we must not complain. We cannot expect to get back the entire eighteen thousand," said Nancy.