"Yes," said Don Rocco, accepting even this with humiliation. "You are right. And now what will the countess say?"
The professor sighed.
"What can I say, my son? She will say nothing. This also has happened, that your successor wrote yesterday that he had definitively gotten rid of his present engagements and was at the disposal of the countess."
Don Rocco was silent, heart-broken. "I must look at the time," said he, after a moment's silence, "because at half-past nine they will come here with a horse to take me away. It will be necessary to ask the archpriest or the chaplain to lend me a suit of clothes."
"Let me, let me!" exclaimed the professor, full of zeal. "I will go home and send it to you immediately. You will give it back to me at your leisure, when you are able." A lively gratitude cleared the face and moved the eyelids of Don Rocco.
"Thanks!" said he, fixing his eyes humbly on the end of his nose.
"Thank you very much!"
"Body of Bacchus!" he added to himself, as the professor was going down the stairs. "He is a span higher than I am, that just occurs to me!"
But it certainly did not occur to him to call him back.
VII.
At half-past nine Don Rocco appeared in the doorway of his house to start on his exodus. The overcoat of the professor danced around his heels and swallowed up his hands down to his finger tips. The stove-pipe hat, of enormous size, came down to his ears. The professor followed right behind him, laughing silently. In the courtyard some people attracted by the report of what had happened were laughing. "Oh, Don Rocco, see what he looks like!" said the women. And one of them would tell him about some action of Lucia, and another about another, things of all kinds which he had never suspected. "Enough, enough," he answered, disturbed in his conscience at all this malicious gossip. "It is now all over, all over."