It takes some time for the Prince to recognize him. He guesses who it is more by the tone of his voice than by his features. Dear old Novoa! The months that have gone by have left a deeper imprint on him than on the rest. He is no longer the young man preoccupied with worldly pomp, who used to consult the Colonel about the merits of various tailors and hatters. He has returned to the slavery of baggy-kneed trousers and ready-made neckties. His beard is full grown and bushy. He is still as young as ever in his voice, his eyes, and his lively and clumsy gestures; but he is dressed, not to say disguised, as an old man.
The Professor is more effusive than the rest on seeing the Prince. He keeps blessing the happy chance, which brought Lubimoff to him, through his meeting with Don Marcos shortly before.
"If you had waited two days longer, Prince, I wouldn't have had the pleasure of seeing you. I am going back to my country day after to-morrow. I have had enough now of Monte Carlo. When I think of what I've lost here!... Money, dreams, everything."
Michael shows discretion. He suspects his friend has had some unexpected disillusionment, some deception, such as one must forget not to be continually tormented by it. He remembers Valeria, and sees nothing in the Professor's appearance to indicate the slightest trace of contact with that lady. He is a ruin, a dry dead tree; the bird that formerly sang in the branches must have flown away long since.
Novoa is equally discreet. He looks at the other man's uniform, and the sleeve with the artificial arm; but he speaks in a general way, with vague regrets, only of what has taken place during the last few months.
"What extraordinary things have taken place! How many friends of ours have died! Life has finally become one of those dramas in which one dies at the end of the last act."
The Prince guesses that Novoa is thinking of Alicia and in order not to give him pain, is refraining from mentioning her. As a matter of fact he is indeed thinking of the Duchess, but she is merely a point of departure before he comes to the other woman with whom his memory is constantly occupied.
At last he speaks, giving full rein to his melancholy. He can tell the Prince everything because he is the only man who knows his secret. (He has told the Colonel and even Spadoni the same thing, on lamenting his misfortune.) And he breaks into despairing recriminations against Valeria.
She has become a different woman. She is no longer interested in "lands of love," where women marry without dowries. Since the Duchess's death she has become a candidate for marriage. Her hand will bring with it more than three hundred thousand francs. The Professor has found himself jilted and forgotten. How he had grovelled before her when the truth was known; what shameful efforts he had made to remedy what he had considered at the outset a woman's passing whim! He hates to remember moments such as those.
"It is all ended, Prince. At present she is crazy about an American officer and will finally marry him. No one counts here except the Americans. Everything is for them: even love. The humblest little milliner considers herself disgraced if she hasn't a soldier from the United States to promenade with in the evening. Every afternoon she and the other man dance in the hotels of La Condamine, or right here in the Café de Paris."