“Still,” resumed Flaminia, to change the conversation, “you haven’t given a penny, heartless man, to abandoned infancy.”
“Not a penny. I don’t like babies.”
“What a wretch! Heaven will punish you. You will die tyrannised over by your housekeeper.”
“Certainly, Donna Flaminia. But I have still something to do before dying,” he added enigmatically, looking at Maria.
“What?” asked Flaminia.
“Not to buy your strawberries, which ruin every one’s skin, but to pay for a basket to please you.”
He extracts from his purse a note for a hundred francs, giving it to the beautiful treasurer, Margherita Savelli, who gives a cry of joy.
“O Flaminia, how kind this sham knave Provana is!”
“Most kind,” Flaminia replied, and she gives him her hand, which he touches with his lips gallantly.
Other people crowd round the stall, and Provana talks softly with Maria Guasco. She replies without looking at him, as if wrapt in her own deep, dominating thoughts, which are marked from eyebrow to eyebrow.