He descended the damp stone stairs and passed out into the street again, dazed and disturbed in mind.  He had been to such people before, as has been said, and he had generally seen or heard something which had either interested or amused him.  He had never had such an experience as this.  He had never heard a voice of which he had been so certain that it did not come from any one in the room, and he had never found any somnambulist who had so instantly grasped his most secret thoughts, without the slightest assistance or leading word from himself.  Yet at the crucial test—­the question of a certainty in the future, this one had stopped short as all stopped, or failed in their predictions of what was to come.  He had been startled and almost frightened.  Like many Southern Italians, he was at once credulous and sceptical—­a superstitious unbeliever, if one may couple the two words into one expression.  His intelligence bade him deny what his temperament inclined him to accept.  Besides, on the present occasion, no theory which he could form could account for the woman’s knowledge of his life.  She had never seen him.  He had no extraordinary peculiarity by which she might have recognized him at first sight from hearsay, nor was he in any way connected with public affairs.  He had come quite unexpectedly and had not given his name, and the spirit, or whatever it might be, had instantly told him of Veronica, of her danger, of his brother and sister-in-law and of the will.  Moreover, the friends who had spoken to him of Giuditta Astarita had told him similar tales within a few days.

The spirit had said that the handsome woman would make him marry Veronica.  But what had the silence meant, when he had asked more?  That was the question.  Did it mean that the spirit was unwilling to affirm that Veronica must die if he refused to marry her?  He passed his hand over his eyes as he walked.  This was the end of the nineteenth century; he was in Naples, in the largest city of an enlightened country.  And yet, the situation might have been taken from the times of the Medici, of Paolo Giordano Orsini, of Beatrice Cenci, of the Borgia.  There was a frightful incongruity between civilization and his life—­between broad, flat, comfortable, every-day, police-regulated civilization, and the hideous drama in which he was suddenly a principal actor.

More than once he told himself that he was mistaken and that such things could not possibly be; that it was all a feverish dream and that he should soon wake to see that there was a perfectly simple, natural and undramatic solution before him.  But turn the facts as he would, he could not find that easy way.  If he refused to marry Veronica and attempted to get legal protection for her, the inevitable result would be the prosecution, conviction, and utter ruin of his brother and of the woman he loved.  If he refused to marry Veronica and did nothing to protect her, Matilde’s eyes had told him what Matilde would do to escape public shame and open infamy.  If he married Veronica and saved his brother—­he was still man enough to feel that he could not do that.  He could die.  That was a possibility of which he had thought.  But would his death, which would save him from committing the last and greatest baseness, save Veronica?  She would have one friend less in the world, and she had not many.