"That is my life, my dear friend. Since you have not quite
forgotten me, write me a word of that good old sympathy on which I
lived so long. It may soon be all I have to live on. If Del Ferice
should have the bad taste to follow Donna Tullia to Saint
Lawrence's, nothing could save me. I should no longer have the
alternative of remaining his slave in exchange for safety from
bankruptcy to myself and ruin—or something like it—to my father.
"But let us talk no more about it all. But for your kindly letter,
no one would ever have known all this, except Contini. In your calm
Egyptian life—thank God, dear, that your life is calm!—my story