She left the latter at her home at last, and they had never parted so coldly in the course of their long friendship. When Maria was alone in her carriage, in the dark, she opened her frock again and took out the envelope and put it into her bag, for she could not bear to let it touch her any longer, and the recollection of Castiglione’s eyes had not faded yet.
To drive the vision of him away she thought of Giuliana, and reflected upon the extreme foolishness of her friend’s suspicions. If the two had meant to meet in the chapel, though only for an instant, it would have been easy to warn Castiglione that Giuliana was in the church, and that he must wait for her to go away before showing himself.
The carriage descended the Via Nazionale on the way home, and had gone a hundred yards further when it stopped short, to Maria’s surprise, and at the same moment she saw a villainous face almost flattened against the glass. Telemaco turned the horses suddenly to the right and drove quickly along the Piazza dei Santi Apostoli, which was almost deserted. The Countess dropped the front window of the brougham and asked what was the matter.
‘There is a riot in Piazza di Venezia, Excellency. They are throwing stones.’
Maria raised the glass again. It was only another strike, she thought, or an anarchist’s funeral, and the carriage would go round by another way. Such disturbances were frequent that winter, but never seemed to have any serious consequences.
When she was at last alone in her boudoir she cut the envelope and spread out the sheet it contained. It was strange to be reading something written in Castiglione’s handwriting, and to feel that it was her duty to read it.
This was what she read:—
‘I, the undersigned, proprietor of a gambling-house in Via Belsiana, and representing Orlando Schmidt, the absconding steward of the Count of Montalto, and my accomplices calling themselves Carlo Pozzi of Palermo and Paolo Pizzuti of Messina, do hereby declare and confess that the photographs of seven letters, more or less, purporting to be written by Her Excellency the Countess of Montalto, by means of which I, and my aforesaid accomplices, have criminally attempted to extort money from her, are reproduced from forgeries executed by the aforesaid Orlando Schmidt, who had surreptitiously obtained specimens of Her Excellency’s handwriting. Rome, this eleventh day of January 1906.