Before he is aware of the change, a singer has become famous, and all men are striving for a sight of him, or a hearing.  There are few like Nino, whose head was not turned at all by the flattery and the praise, being occupied with other things.  As he sat by the roadside, he thought of the many nights when the house rang with cheers and cries and all manner of applause; and he remembered how, each time he looked his audience in the face, he had searched for the one face of all faces that he cared to see, and had searched in vain.

He seemed now to understand that it was his honest-hearted love for the fair northern girl that had protected him from caring for the outer world, and he now realised what the outer world was.  He fancied to himself what his first three months of brilliant success might have been, in Rome and Paris, if he had not been bound by some strong tie of the heart to keep him serious and thoughtful.  He thought of the women who had smiled upon him, and of the invitations that had besieged him, and of the consternation that had manifested itself when he declared his intention of retiring to Rome, after his brilliant engagement in Paris, without signing any further contract.

Then came the rapid journey, the excitement, the day in Rome, the difficulties of finding Fillettino; and at last he was here, sitting by the roadside, and waiting for it to be time to carry into execution the bold scheme he had set before him.  His conscience was at rest, for he now felt that he had done all that the most scrupulous honour could exact of him.  He had returned in the midst of his success to make an honourable offer of marriage, and he had been refused,—­because he was a plebeian, forsooth!  And he knew also that the woman he loved was breaking her heart for him.

What wonder that he set his teeth, and said to himself that she should be his, at any price!  Nino has no absurd ideas about the ridicule that attaches to loving a woman, and taking her if necessary.  He has not been trained up in the heart of the wretched thing they call society, which ruined me long ago.  What he wants he asks for, like a child, and if it is refused, and his good heart tells him that he has a right to it, he takes it like a man, or like what a man was in the old time before the Englishman discovered that he is an ape.  Ah, my learned colleagues, we are not so far removed from the ancestral monkey but that there is serious danger of our shortly returning to that primitive and caudal state!  And I think that my boy and the Prussian officer, as they sat on their beasts and bowed, and smiled, and offered to fight each other, or to shake hands, each desiring to oblige the other, like a couple of knights of the old ages, were a trifle farther removed from our common gorilla parentage than some of us.