She looked at him with an expression of fear in her eyes. “Ah!” she cried. “You know the truth, Nino. I see by your face!”
“I know that you, whom I have known as Gemma Fanetti, are none other than the Contessa Funaro!”
Her breast heaved and fell quickly, and she hung her head.
“Well?”
He moved towards her, his hands still in the pockets of his heavy tweed overcoat.
“Well,” he repeated, “and what excuse have you for so deceiving me?”
“None,” she answered in her soft Tuscan, her eyes still downcast. “I loved you, Nino, and I feared—”
She hesitated, without finishing the sentence.
“You feared to tell me the truth, even though you well knew that I was foolishly infatuated; that I was a love-blind idiot? No; I don’t believe you,” he cried fiercely. “You had some further, some deeper motive.” She was silent. Her nervous fingers hitched themselves in the lace of her gown, and she grew pallid and haggard.
“I now know who you are; how grossly you have deceived me, and how ingeniously I have been tricked,” he cried bitterly, speaking Italian with difficulty. “You whom I believed honest and loving, I have found to be only an adventuress, a woman whose notoriety has spread from Como to Messina.”