"Am I, then, dishonoured?" he thought, with a rush of bitterness. The morning passed and afternoon came: he was alone, and for the third or fourth time in three or four hours he asked Giovanna if letters or telegrams had arrived. It was an almost convulsive demand, which he had repeated constantly for three weeks, the only demand that showed another human being the state of convulsion in which he found himself. Nothing came, nor that morning either, except the newspapers, and a letter from Donna Maria Lante from Terni, which Giovanna had at once consigned to him. He composed his face, resumed the artless, jolly expression which had been his worldly mask, went to lunch at the club, and replied to three or four friends that the marriage would certainly take place in April. He jested with everyone; he held up his head before all, but he did not fail to observe that in questions, in compliments, in congratulations, there was a sense of hesitation, as of a slight incredulity and a little irony. The old Duke of Althan was very cold with him; Marco Fiore scarcely greeted him. Hurt and very nervous, he thought:
"Am I, then, dishonoured?"
He returned home: there were no letters or telegrams. He went out again to Calori's fencing school, and passed an hour of violent exercise, in which he allowed to escape whatever was insupportable in his pain; again he returned home, found nothing there, and went out to leave cards on two or three foreign ladies, whose acquaintance he had made the day before at a tea at the English Ambassadress'. He wandered through Rome, and for the third time, as if it were the way of the Cross, he repaired home, asked Giovanna from the speaking-tube if there were anything for him. She replied that there was a telephone message for him. Disillusioned, more than ever pierced by anxiety, he went upstairs, took from the landing-place the little card on which Giovanna had written the telephone message, and read:
"A friend from America expects Don Vittorio Lante at the Grand Hotel at half-past four to take a cup of tea. Room Number Twenty-seven."
Vittorio trembled from head to foot, like a tree shaken by the wind; he drew out his watch convulsively. It wanted ten minutes to the appointment; he hurled himself into a cab, trembling and controlling himself, not noticing the streets he passed, and biting his lips at every obstacle his carriage met. On at last reaching the vestibule of the Grand Hotel, he threw the No. 27 to the porter. Refusing the lift, bounding up the stairs to the first floor, he knocked at twenty-seven, while his heart seemed to leap into his throat, suffocating him. From within the clear, harmonious voice of Mabel Clarke said to him in English:
"Come in!"
His face changed to a mortal pallor in her presence, as standing in the middle of the great, bright room, full of flowers, she offered him her hand; his too intense emotion filled his eyes with tears. He took the hand and kissed it, while his tears fell on it.
"Oh, dear, dear old boy," murmured Mabel, moved, looking at him affectionately and smiling.
He held the hand between his own, looked into his fiancée's eyes, and the cry, so often repressed, was from the depth of his heart:
"Mabel, I swear to you that I am an honest man."