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D'Arbino and Finello exchanged glances behind him as he rose from the sofa on which he had hitherto been lying. "We will help you in everything," said D'Arbino, soothingly. "Trust in us to the end. What do you wish to do first?" "The figure must have gone through this room. Let us descend the staircase and ask the servants if they have seen it pass." They inquired down to the very courtyard.
They noticed a change to blankness and stillness in his face, and when he spoke, an indescribable alteration in the tone of his voice. "I found you in a room in the corridor," said D'Arbino. "What made you faint? Don't you remember? Was it the heat?" Fabio waited for a moment, painfully collecting his ideas. He looked at the valet, and Finello signed to the man to withdraw.
It is too soon to break in upon their happiness, or I should have felt inclined to run the boat on shore." "I never heard the end of that strange adventure of the Yellow Mask," said Finello. "There was a priest mixed up in it, was there not?" "Yes; but nobody seems to know exactly what has become of him. He was sent for to Rome, and has never been heard of since.
Glasses there! three glasses, my lovely shepherdess with the black eyes the three largest you have got." The glasses were brought; the Cavaliere Finello chose a particular bottle, and filled them. All three gentlemen turned round to the sideboard to use it as a table, and thus necessarily faced the looking-glass. "Now let us drink the toast of toasts," said D'Arbino.
Count Fabio, let me present to you my intimate and good friend, the Cavaliere Finello, with whose family I know you are well acquainted. Finello, the count is a little out of spirits, and I have prescribed a good dose of wine. I see a whole row of bottles at your side, and I leave it to you to apply the remedy.
"Does any one know who this Yellow Mask is?" asked Finello. "One may guess by the walk that the figure is a woman's. Perhaps it may be the strange color she has chosen for her dress, or perhaps her stealthy way of moving from room to room; but there is certainly something mysterious and startling about her." "Startling enough, as the count would tell you," said D'Arbino.
The merry laughter of the girl, and the lively notes of the guitar were heard distinctly across the still water. "Edge a little nearer in shore," said D'Arbino to his friend, who was steering; "and keep as I do in the shadow of the sail. I want to see the faces of those persons on the beach without being seen by them." Finello obeyed.
He took up the box with the mask in it, and beckoning to Nanina to follow him, led the way to Fabio's chamber. About six months after the events already related, Signor Andrea D'Arbino and the Cavaliere Finello happened to be staying with a friend, in a seaside villa on the Castellamare shore of the bay of Naples. Most of their time was pleasantly occupied on the sea, in fishing and sailing.
"Yes, sir; I was engaged by that lady for the evening engaged to drive her to the ball as well as to drive her home." "Where did you take her from?" "From a very extraordinary place from the gate of the Campo Santo burial-ground." During this colloquy, Finello and D'Arbino had been standing with Fabio between them, each giving him an arm.
From some broken ejaculations which escaped him, it seemed as if he dreaded that his senses were leaving him, and that he was praying to be preserved in his right mind. "Why is he so violently agitated?" said Finello, eagerly, to his friend. "Hush!" returned the other. "You heard him say that when he saw the face behind the yellow mask, it was the face of his dead wife?" "Yes. But what then?"
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