Veronica wondered why her aunt and uncle did not propose to go to the country.  Macomer had a pretty place in the hills near Caserta, and though it was winter the climate there was very pleasant.  She did not know that the house was already dismantled, in anticipation of the probable foreclosure of a mortgage.  Besides, in his desperate position, Gregorio would have feared to leave Naples for a day.  As for making a journey to some other city, he was positively reduced to the point of having no ready money with which to go.  Lamberto Squarci, the notary, positively refused to advance anything, and it was quite certain that no one else would.  For Squarci, who was a wise villain in his way, and had aided and abetted Macomer’s frauds in order to enrich himself, had only given his assistance so long as he was quite sure that he was acting as the paid agent of Veronica’s guardian.  The responsibility was then entirely theirs, and he merely obeyed their directions in preparing any necessary legal documents.  But as soon as the guardianship had expired, he knew that in order to be of use in helping Macomer to rob his ward, he should be obliged to artificially construct the instruments needed, in such a way as to appear legal to the world.  In such business, forgery could not be far off.  The man had himself to think of as well as mere money, and at the point where the smallest illegality of action on his part would have begun, he stopped short, and refused to do anything whatever, leaving Macomer to grapple with his creditors as best he might, and to take care of himself if he could.  It was now the middle of December, and the guardianship had expired, legally speaking, in the previous month of March, when Macomer’s debts had already reached a very high figure.  Macomer, after that, had presumed upon his authority and position to draw Veronica’s income for his own purposes.  That was easy, as the revenues accrued almost entirely from the great landed estates, of which the various stewards were in the habit of sending the rents, when collected, directly to Macomer.  It was clear that unless Veronica herself protested, and until the authorities should discover that she was being cheated, these men would naturally continue to send the rents to the order of Gregorio Macomer.

Feeling that he was near the end of his chances, he had desperately attempted to improve his position by using as much of the year’s income as he could extract from the stewards, in a final speculation.  This had failed.  He had not been able to pay the interest on his mortgages, and the ready money was all gone.  A disastrous financial crisis had supervened, which had made itself felt throughout the country, and the banks which held the mortgages had given notice that they would foreclose some of them, and not renew the others.  If Gregorio Macomer could have laid hands, no matter how, on any sum of money worth mentioning, he would have fled, under an assumed name, to the Argentine Republic, the usual