She laughed her tired laugh and said in her tired voice the last words he was ever destined to hear from her:
“Oh, I don't mind, if you don't. It was so innocent, it was what decided me.”
One of the hundreds of good saints that belong to Rome must have overheard her and pitied the young man, for it is ascribable only to some such special act of mercy that Mellin understood (and he did) exactly what she meant.