"For what?" asked the Contessa, raising her eyebrows again. "Do you think I meant anything by it?"
"Certainly not," replied Ghisleri, with the utmost calmness. "I suppose your instinct told you that it would be more novel and effective if the Saint yielded than if she played the old-fashioned scene of crushing the devil under her foot."
"Would you have let yourself be crushed?"
"By you—yes." Ghisleri spoke slowly and looked steadily into her eyes.
The Contessa's face softened a little, and she paused before she answered him.
"I wish I knew—I wish I were sure whether I really have any influence over you," she said softly, and then sighed and looked away.
It was very late when the party broke up, though all had professed the most positive intention of going home when the clock struck twelve. The Princess of Gerano offered Arden a seat in her carriage, and Pietro Ghisleri went away alone. As he passed through the deserted dining-room, and through the hall where he had sat so long with the Contessa, he could not help glancing at the corner where they had talked, and he thought involuntarily of the prologue to the tableau. His face was set rather sternly, but he smiled, too, as he went by.
"It is not my last Carnival yet," he said to himself, as he drew on a great driving-coat which covered his costume completely. Then he went out.
It is very hard to say whether he was a sentimental man or not. Men who write second-rate verses when they are alone, generally are; but, on the other hand, those who knew him would not have allowed that he possessed a grain of what is commonly called sentimentality. The word probably means a sort of vague desire to experience rather fictitious emotions, with the intention of believing oneself to be passionate by nature, and in that sense the weakness could not justly be attributed to Ghisleri. But on this particular night he did a thing which many people would undoubtedly have called sentimental. He turned aside from the highway when he left the great palace in which Gouache lived, and he allowed himself to wander aimlessly on through the older part of the city, until he stopped opposite to the door of a church which stood in a broad street near the end of the last by-way he had traversed. The night was dark and gloomy and the stillness was only broken now and then by a distant snatch of song, a burst of laughter, or the careless twang of a guitar, just as Ghisleri had described it. Indeed it was by no means the first time that he had walked home in the small hours of Ash Wednesday morning, after a night of gaiety and emotion.
It chanced that the church upon which he had accidentally come was the one known as the Church of Prayer and Death. It stands in the Via Giulia, behind the Palazzo Farnese. He realised the fact at once, and it seemed like a bad omen. He stood still a long time, looking at the gloomy door with steady eyes.