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Then Guido was sure that they smiled perceptibly, and she bent her head in assent, but so slightly that her eyes were still fixed on Lamberti's. Other guests came up at that moment, and the two friends made way for them. "Come back through the house," said Guido, in a low voice.
Somehow, his consent still seemed needful to Lamberti's love, and it seemed so to Cecilia, too, and there was no denying that he was now in danger of his life. If he was to die, there would probably be a lucid hour before death, but what right would his best friend have to embitter those final moments for one who would certainly go out of this world with no hope of the next?
It would be absurd to pretend, he thought, that his own material world was the same as Lamberti's, even when the latter was at home. They knew the same people, heard the same talk, ate the same things, looked on the same sights, breathed the same air. There was perhaps no sacrifice worthy of honourable men which either of them would not make for the other.
"Lamberti and I were together, talking, and I said that nothing would ever induce me to marry an heiress, unless it were to save my father or mother from ruin. As that can never happen, all heiresses are perfectly safe from me! Do you mind my having said that?" "No. I am sure you were in earnest." A shadow had crossed her face at the mention of Lamberti's name.
Further, if the specialist had known positively that similar fragments of dreams were little by little putting themselves together in Lamberti's imagination, though the latter had only once spoken with Cecilia of one or two coincidences, he would have said, provided that he chose to be frank with a mere girl, that no one knows much about telepathy, and that modern science does not deny what it cannot explain, as the science of the nineteenth century did, but collects and examines facts, only requiring to be persuaded that they are really facts and not fictions.
"It seems so funny that you should be called Doudou at your age," answered Cecilia. "Really " Monsieur Leroy looked at the Princess as if asking for protection. She laughed good-humouredly, somewhat to Lamberti's surprise. "You are very direct with my friends, my dear," she said to Cecilia, still smiling. The Countess Fortiguerra, not knowing exactly what to do, also smiled, but rather foolishly.
There was not much light in the room, but she could see that she was very pale, and that her eyes had a strange look in them, more like Lamberti's than her own. It was a possession; she found him everywhere. Behind her image in the glass she saw the door of the room, the only one there was, which she had so often heard closed softly just as her dream ended.
His friend knew him, and the danger was real. The conviction flashed through her brain that if she left him alone he would probably kill himself, and she fancied him lying there dead, on the red tiles. She fancied, too, Lamberti's face, when he should come to tell her what had happened, for he would surely come, and to the end of her life and his he would never forgive her.
Perhaps it would be better to leave him, as he wished that she should, but his words recalled Lamberti's warning; his hand was steady, he said, and that meant that it was steady enough to take the pistol from the drawer in the little table and use it. He believed in nothing, in no future, in no retribution, in no God, and he was ill, lonely, and in despair through her fault.
Lamberti's expression had neither softened nor changed while he was scratching the mark, and when he went on his way he looked precisely as he did when he was going up the steps of the Ministry to attend a meeting of the Commission. He had good nerves, as he had told the specialist whom he had consulted in the spring.
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