Then the city began to sound on every side. Cabs rattled, electric trams tinkled, vendors called their wares in the streets, and the new Rome, the Rome of the Kings, awoke.
Somebody was singing as he came upstairs. It was Bruno, coming to his work. He looked astonished, for the lamps were still burning, although the sunlight was streaming into the room.
"Been working all night, Donna Roma?"
"Fear I have, Bruno, but I'm going to bed now."
She had an impulse to call him up to her work and say, "Look! I did that, for I am a great artist." But no! Not yet! Not yet!
She had covered up the clay, and turned the key of her own compartment, when the bell rang on the floor above. It was the porter with the post, and Natalina, in curl papers, met her on the landing with the letters.
One of them was from the Mayor, thanking her for what she had done for Charles Minghelli; another was from her landlord, thanking her for his translation to Paris; a third was from the fashionable modiste, thanking her for an invitation from the Minister. A feeling of shame came over her as she glanced at these letters. They brought the implication of an immoral influence, the atmosphere of an evil life.
There was a fourth letter. It was from the Minister himself. She had seen it from the first, but a creepy sense of impending trouble had made her keep it to the last. Ought she to open it? She ought, she must!
"My darling Child,—News at last, too, and success within hail! Minghelli, the Grand Hotel, the reference in London, and the dead-and-buried nightmare have led up to and compassed everything! Prepare for a great surprise—David Rossi is not David Rossi, but a condemned man who has no right to live in Italy! Prepare for a still greater surprise—he has no right to live at all!
"So you are avenged! The man humiliated and degraded you. He insulted me also, and did his best to make me resign my portfolio and put my private life on its defence. You set out to undo the effects of his libel and to punish him for his outrage. You've done it! You have avenged yourself for both of us! It's all your work! You are magnificent! And now let us draw the net closer ... let us hold him fast ... let us go on as we have begun...."