“About a quarter, I fancy, from what the clerk told me.”

A long silence followed, during which Orsino tried to review the situation in all its various aspects.  It was clear that Del Ferice did not wish Andrea Contini and Company to fail and was putting himself to serious inconvenience in order to avert the catastrophe.  Whether he wished, in so doing, to keep Orsino in his power, or whether he merely desired to escape the charge of having ruined his old enemy’s son out of spite, it was hard to decide.  Orsino passed over that question quickly enough.  So far as any sense of humiliation was concerned he knew very well that his mother would be ready and able to pay off all his liabilities at the shortest notice.  What Orsino felt most deeply was profound disappointment and utter disgust at his own folly.  It seemed to him that he had been played with and flattered into the belief that he was a serious man of business, while all along he had been pushed and helped by unseen hands.  There was nothing to prove that Del Ferice had not thus deceived him from the first; and, indeed, when he thought of his small beginnings early in the year and realised the dimensions which the business had now assumed, he could not help believing that Del Ferice had been at the bottom of all his apparent success and that his own earnest and ceaseless efforts had really had but little to do with the development of his affairs.  His vanity suffered terribly under the first shock.

He was bitterly disappointed.  During the preceding months he had begun to feel himself independent and able to stand alone, and he had looked forward in the near future to telling his father that he had made a fortune for himself without any man’s help.  He had remembered every word of cold discouragement to which he had been forced to listen at the very beginning, and he had felt sure of having a success to set against each one of those words.  He knew that he had not been idle and he had fancied that every hour of work had produced its permanent result, and left him with something more to show.  He had seen his mother’s pride in him growing day by day in his apparent success, and he had been confident of proving to her that she was not half proud enough.  All that was gone in a moment.  He saw, or fancied that he saw, nothing but a series of failures which had been bolstered up and inflated into seeming triumphs by a man whom his father despised and hated and whom, as a man, he himself did not respect.  The disillusionment was complete.

At first it seemed to him that there was nothing to be done but to go directly to Saracinesca and tell the truth to his father and mother.  Financially, when the wealth of the family was taken into consideration there was nothing very alarming in the situation.  He would borrow of his father enough to clear him with Del Ferice and would sell the unfinished buildings for what they would bring.  He might even induce his father to help him in finishing the work.  There would be no trouble about the business question.  As for Contini, he should not lose by the transaction and permanent occupation could doubtless be found for him on one of the estates if he chose to accept it.