'The Madonna bless your ladyship!' said Margherita, getting up after crossing herself.
'Thank you,' the young girl answered simply, sitting down again beside her bed, where she spent so many hours of the day thinking and reading.
Margherita had left the door open as she went away. Now the voices burst out angrily. The enraged Cabalists argued furiously with each other, each one boasting loudly of his own way of getting lottery numbers, his own researches, his own visions, each one trying to take the word from the other, interrupting, screaming louder, being interrupted in turn.
'You don't believe in Cifariello the cobbler's talent?' Marzano the lawyer shouted with the white fury of very gentle, good-natured people. 'Perhaps because he is a cobbler, and perhaps because he writes out his problems with charcoal on a dirty bit of white paper! Here it is, here it is! Twenty-seven has come out second instead of fourth, but it came out! Here is eighty-four, that turned round and became forty-eight, but it did come out! Here is the ambo made up of fourteen and seventy-nine I was so unlucky as to give up playing; it came out three weeks after I gave it up. These are facts, gentlemen—facts, not words!'
'They are the sixty francs a month you give him to leave off cobbling and work out numbers for you!' Dr. Trifari interrupted sharply.
'Cifariello is ignorant, but sincere; he gave me fourteen and seventy-nine, and I did not go on with it.'
'Father Illuminato gave me fourteen and seventy-nine, too,' Dr. Trifari retorted, 'but it was the right week.'
'And you won without letting your friends know?' the Marquis di Formosa asked excitedly.
'I won nothing. I divided it into two different tickets. I did not understand what a fortune Father Illuminato was giving me. He is the only one that knows numbers. He holds our fortunes, our future, in his hands. It is a queer thing. When I felt his pulse to see if he had fever, I went trembling all over.'
'Father Illuminato is an egotist!' Professor Colaneri hissed out in a sarcastic, biting voice.