He was neither shocked nor amused; Ercole had asked him similar questions when he had been a boy; so had the peasants in Calabria, and there was no reason why Regina should know more than they did.  Besides, she possessed wonderful tact, and now spoke her own language so well that she could pass for a person of average education, so long as she avoided speaking of anything that is learned from books.  She was very quick to understand everything connected with the people she heard of, and she never forgot anything that Marcello told her.  She was grateful to him for never laughing at her, but in reality he was indifferent.  If she had known everything within bounds of knowledge, she would not have been a whit more beautiful, or more loving, or more womanly.

But he himself was beginning to think, now that his faith in Folco had been shaken, and he began to realise that he had been strangely torpid and morally listless during the past years.  The shock his whole system had received, the long interval during which his memory had been quite gone, the physical languor that had lasted some time after his recovery from the fever, had all combined to make the near past seem infinitely remote, to cloud his judgment of reality, and to destroy the healthy tension of his natural will.  A good deal of what Corbario had called “harmless dissipation” had made matters worse, and when Regina had persuaded him to leave Paris he had really been in that dangerous moral, intellectual, and physical condition in which it takes very little to send a man to the bad altogether, and not much more to kill him outright, if he be of a delicate constitution and still very young.  Corbario had almost succeeded in his work of destruction.

He would not succeed now, for the worst danger was past, and Marcello had found his feet after being almost lost in the quicksand through which he had been led.

He had not at first accused Folco of anything worse than that one little deception about the arrival of the Contessa, and of having caused him to be too closely watched by Settimia.  Little by little, however, other possibilities had shaped themselves and had grown into certainties at an alarming rate.  He understood all at once how Folco himself had been spending his time, while society had supposed him to be a broken hearted widower.  A few hints which he had let fall about the things he would have shown Marcello in Paris suggested a great deal; his looks and manner told the rest, now that Marcello had guessed the main truth.  He had not waited three months after his wife’s death to profit by his liberty and the wealth she had left him.  Marcello remembered the addresses he had given from time to time—­Monte Carlo, Hombourg, Pau, and Paris very often.  He had spoken of business in his letters, as an excuse for moving about so much, but “business” did not always take a man to places of amusement, and Folco seemed to have visited no others.  Men whom Marcello had met had seen Corbario, and what they said about him was by no means indefinite.  He had been amusing himself, and not alone, and the young men had laughed at his attempts to cloak his doings under an appearance of sorrowing respectability.