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Updated: June 3, 2025
Marcello had told Folco quite plainly that he meant to be the master, and that he was of age, and should regulate his own life as he pleased, and he had expressed considerable disgust at the existence Folco had been leading in Paris and elsewhere; and Folco had always tried to laugh it off, calling Marcello prudish and hypersensitive in matters of morality, which he certainly was not.
Then Messer Folco laughed good-humoredly, and, turning to Guido, said, "Messer Guido, of your charity, let us hear." But Guido, the ever obliging, was here unwilling to oblige. "Shall the owl croak the notes of the nightingale?" he asked, extending his open palms in a gesture of emphatic denial.
Was she in the habit of writing to him? Corbario had found her for Regina; was Settimia helping Corbario to exercise a sort of paternal vigilance over him? Somehow Marcello did not like that idea at all. So far as he knew, Folco had always been singularly frank with him, and had never deceived him in the smallest thing, even "for his own good."
In the magnificent library of the villa on the Janiculum, Folco was guessing, too, and with no better result. But because he could not guess right, and could get no news of Marcello, his eyes were growing hollow and his cheeks wan.
And so to come back to Messer Folco and his house and his garden and his friends and the festival he gave them.
"He speaks most affectionately of you. But you had better not come until this afternoon, and then you must not stay long. The doctors say he must rest quietly." "I will come at four o'clock. Thank you. Good-bye." "Good-bye." The click of the instrument, as Folco hung the receiver on the hook, and it was over.
He did not like Simone any better than I did, but he had a way of accepting facts more readily. "Simone mostly wins his wish. See how far he has gone already. He has so worked it that her father has brought his lovely daughter from the hills to the city. Old Folco favors him, and small wonder, Messer Simone being the power he is in Florence.
I asked. Guido looked cryptic. "That is for father Folco to settle," he said. "And father Folco is a man that loves his fellow-men, but would have his children obey him even to the death, like a Roman father of old." I began to take the matter hotly, thinking it over and looking at it this way and that way.
The world should see that he was doing his duty by the boy. He left Paris with regret, as he always did, after writing to Marcello twenty-four hours beforehand. He wrote at the same time to Settimia. "Folco will be here to-morrow," Marcello said, as he and Regina sat under the pine-trees beyond the stream, a little way above the town.
"By the bye," he said carelessly, "there is another reason why you may not care to stay long in Pontresina. The Contessa and Aurora are there." "Are they?" Marcello turned sharply as he asked the question. He was surprised, and at the same instant it flashed upon him that Folco had just received the information from Settimia in the note that had been brought. "Yes," Folco answered with a smile.
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