"Excellent advice!" he said, smiling, "and not difficult to follow. Now to attire for the festival. Have I your permission?"
I touched the bell which summoned Vincenzo, and bade him wait on Signer Ferrari's orders. Guido disappeared under his escort, giving me a laughing nod of salutation as he left the room. I watched his retiring figure with a strange pitifulness--the first emotion of the kind that had awakened in me for him since I learned his treachery. His allusion to that time when we had been students together--when we had walked with arms round each other's necks "like school-girls," as he said, had touched me more closely than I cared to realize. It was true, we had been happy then--two careless youths with all the world like an untrodden race-course before us. SHE had not then darkened the heaven of our confidence; she had not come with her false fair face to make of ME a blind, doting madman, and to transform him into a liar and hypocrite. It was all her fault, all the misery and horror; she was the blight on our lives; she merited the heaviest punishment, and she would receive it. Yet, would to God we had neither of us ever seen her! Her beauty, like a sword, had severed the bonds of friendship that after all, when it DOES exist between two men, is better and braver than the love of woman. However, all regrets were unavailing now; the evil was done, and there was no undoing it. I had little time left me for reflection; each moment that passed brought me nearer to the end I had planned and foreseen.