“You wish to be my trumpeter, eh?” said the Frenchman, sadly smiling.  “But what is to become of me during your absence and of M. Daniels?  Remember that I have nobody to understand me, sympathize with me, become endeared to me, and aid me!”

“I, alone?” repeated the Italian, affected by the melancholy tone common to the man of one idea who must, to concentrate his thoughts, set aside other ties of union with his race.

“Do you doubt it?”

Antonino felt no doubt.  He would be the most to be deplored among men if he were not fond of Clemenceau after all that he had done for him.  He was an orphan vagrant, next to a beggar, when he had been housed by him, kept, and highly educated.  Then, too, with a frankness not common among born brothers, the Frenchman had associated him in all his labors for the revolution in the science of artillery—­the greatest since Bacon discovered gunpowder.  All that he was, he owed to the man before him.

“Believe me, father,” he said, earnestly, “I esteem and venerate you!”

“And yet you keep secrets from me!” reproached Clemenceau.

“I—­I have no secrets.”

“I see you are too serious.”

“I am only sorrowful—­sorrowful at quitting you.”

“Why should you do it, I repeat?”

“I am never merry—­happiness is not my portion,” faltered Antonino, not knowing what answer to make.

“That’s nothing.  Better now than later!  At your age, unhappiness is easily borne—­it is only what the sporting gentlemen call a preliminary canter.  Wait till you come to the actual race!”

“I am not fit to dwell with others—­with grave, earnest men; I am too nervous and impressionable.”

“Because you come of an excitable race, and your childhood was passed in too deep poverty.  You will grow out of all that, gradually.  Stay here; oh, keep with me, for I have need of you and you require a companion-soul, soothing like mine.  The kind of disappointment you experience is not to be cured by change of place.  You carry it with you, and distance increases and strengthens it, and whenever you meet the object again to whom was due the vexation you will perceive that you went on the journey for no good.”

Antonino looked at the speaker as one regards the mind-reader who has answered to the point.  Clemenceau fixed him with his serene, unvarying eyes, and continued, in an emotionless voice, like a statue, speaking: 

“You are in love—­and you love my wife.”

Antonino started away and involuntarily lifted his hands in a position of defense.  Averting his eyes and unclenching his fists, he muttered sullenly: 

“What makes you suppose that?”

“I saw it was so.”

At the end of a silence more burdensome than any before the younger man found his voice and, as though tears interfered with his utterance, said pathetically, and indistinctly: 

“Do you not acknowledge, master, now, that I must go; for when I am far away, perhaps you will forgive the ingrate!”