"I have," said Theodore, loudly and firmly; "I have--for she is my wife!"
"His wife!" ran through the crowd. The nearest drew back a step.
"Your wife! that you must prove--or it may be,--halt!" interrupted the sailor. "Tell us her name, sir, her name! a husband generally knows so much of his wife, even though he don't know what she is about in the streets late at night."
"Caterina," said Theodore, "do you know me?"
"Yes," answered the girl.
"Caterina!" murmured the sailor; "it is right--so the other one called her."
"You will go with me, Caterina?" said Theodore--"you will tell me the reason why you have left me, and forced me to seek you up and down the streets of Rome in anger and fear? So! to Ostia? and he was going to meet you there? It is enough--come!"
He spoke so sternly, and with a face in which sorrow and anger were so plainly written that no one doubted him for a moment. "It is her husband," they whispered: "she was going to run off with the other. God pity him, when he falls into his hands, as she has done!"
Caterina did nothing to undeceive them. Obediently she ascended the steps by Theodore's side; and her astonishment at being saved by him, to escape whom she had fallen into the danger, resembled the conscious confusion of a discovered criminal. The sailor alone did not seem perfectly convinced. He looked at the piece of gold which Theodore had thrown to him, and growled, "If it was all right, the gentleman would not have put his hand in his pocket. Well, I am doubly paid, at all events: what does it matter to me?"