"About what?"
"About the woman."
"Lucia? Right! And by the way, where is Lucia? Not here? Run away?"
Don Rocco nodded. Marin looked at him stupefied and repeating, "Run away? Run away?" The other four came back into the room echoing, "Run away? Run away?"
"But listen!" said the professor. "Are you staying in bed for this reason? Are you humiliating yourself in this way? Come on and get dressed."
Don Rocco looked at him, reddened up to the top of his head, narrowed his tear-wet eyes in a smile, which meant: "Now it will be your turn to laugh."
"I have no clothes," he said.
"What?"
The professor added to this word a gesture which meant, "Did she carry them away?" Don Rocco responded also by a mere nod; and seeing that his friend with difficulty restrained a burst of laughter, he also tried to laugh.
"Poor Don Rocco," said the professor, and added, still with a laugh in his throat, heartfelt words of sympathy, of comfort, and asked for every detail of what had happened. "Oh, if you had only listened to me!" he concluded. "If you had only sent her away!"