Pulling her shawl round her, she went away, with her head down, as if overpowered by tiredness. Next to Rosa, the unfortunates' servant, came Baron Annibale Lamarra, fat, pale, panting with his hurried walk from one lottery bank to another. He played many tickets of twenty, fifty, a hundred francs each; but, fearing to be spied on by his miserly wife, whose dower he wasted, in spite of terrible scenes, afraid of being caught by his father, a self-made man, he had got up the fraud of playing a ticket at each place. He ran panting from one lottery to another, trying to believe he would win on Saturday and take back the promissory note from Don Gennaro Parascandolo, the one that had his wife's signature. The thought of it made him shiver with fright. When he got out of Don Crescenzio's lottery-shop he breathed again, and reckoned up mentally. Of the two thousand francs, he had given two hundred to Ambrogio Marzano, the cheerful old lawyer, for arranging with Parascandolo; then he had staked one thousand six hundred francs in different banks. He had two hundred francs left. He would stake them next day, for perhaps he would dream of some good number at night. It was no use risking it all at once. In the meanwhile, from the other door, just as he got out, Don Ambrogio Marzano came in. He stopped to talk with the Marquis di Formosa.
'Have you some good lottery numbers?' Formosa asked anxiously. He clung to the pleasant old man as a bearer of luck.
'I have a forty-nine secondo that is a love, my lord!' whispered the enthusiast, so as not to be heard.
'Ah! and what else?'
'Twenty-seven, you know, is the sympathetic number at the end of the month.'
'I have it, too. What do you say of the fourteenth?'
'It is very good, my lord; but do you wish really to know the lightning, the dazzling number?'
'Tell me—tell me!'
'I tell you in brotherly love, because when I have a treasure I can't be selfish with it, and keep it to myself. You may have it as a proof of affection—it is thirty-five!'
'Ah!' said the Marquis in a stupor of admiration.