'You know him?' asked Fragalà anxiously.
'Eh, we are friends,' Crescenzio muttered.
'He knows the numbers, does he not?' Fragalà asked, with a quiver in his throat.
'Often he gets them right.'
'How often?'
'When his client is in God's favour,' the agent answered enigmatically. Wishing to end the conversation, he politely handed over the tickets, saying: 'Five hundred and forty francs.'
Fragalà paid stolidly with a tradesman's calm, without changing expression. But when he got out of the lottery-shop, at the door, his smile faded; he remembered he had made his first debt to a money-lender that day, and that he had given security on the shop funds, having also taken out the whole balance to make up the big sum he had staked. It was to get away from these sad thoughts that he joined the group of Cabalists. At one in the morning, standing in front of the gambling place, they neither felt the hours passing, the lateness, nor the penetrating damp; for they burned with that constant inward fire that flamed up from Friday to Saturday. They began the same stories again, at great length, for the thousandth time, interrupting each other, getting heated and excited, staring at each other with wild, humid eyes, as if they were possessed. Cesare Fragalà listened, trying to get the same fever, but not succeeding; for he was only a weak soul, not mad, nor subject to nerves. When they all went over the reasons that made them gamble, such and such material and moral needs, urgent and impelling, that the lottery alone could satisfy, he listened in a melancholy way. At one point he said:
'I—I need sixty thousand francs to open a shop towards San Ferdinando, and make a marriage portion for Agnesina.'
A deep sadness overpowered him. Good, honest, incapable of lying about anything to his wife, he had deceived her for months, like a cheat; he took the ledgers she often stopped to turn over out of her hands, and with hourly caution he tried to hide his vice from her, thus destroying his good temper and ease.
'If it were not for this shop, if it were not for Agnesina——' he muttered, a prey to inconsolable bitterness.