Regina and Marcello sat side by side, talking in a low voice, and looking at each other now and then.  The little house in which they had been happy was turned to a place of death and horror, and both knew that some change was coming to themselves.

“You cannot live here any more,” Marcello said at dawn, “not even till to-night.”

“Where could I go?” Regina asked.  “Why should I not stay here?  Do you think I am afraid of the dead woman?”

“No,” Marcello answered, “but you cannot stay here.”

He guessed what talking and gossiping there would be when the newspapers told what had happened in the little house, how the reporters would hang about the street for a week to come, and how fashionable people would go out of their way to see the place where a murder had been committed by such a well-known person as Corbario, and where he had been taken almost in the very act, and himself nearly killed.  Besides all that, there would be the public curiosity about Regina, who had been so intimately concerned in a part of the tragedy, and whose name was everywhere associated with his own.

He would have taken her away from Rome at once, if he could have done so.  But he knew that they would both be called upon during the next few days to repeat in court the evidence they had already given in their first deposition.  There was sure to be the most frightful publicity about the whole affair, of which reports would be published not only in Rome but throughout Italy, and all over the world.  In real life the consequences of events generally have the importance which fiction is obliged to give the events themselves; which is the reason why the things that happen to real people rarely come to any precise conclusion, like those reached by a play or a novel.  The “conclusion” lies in the lives of the people, after the tragedy, or the drama, or the comedy has violently upset their existences.

“You cannot stay here,” Marcello repeated with conviction.

“You will go on living at your villa,” Regina answered.  “Why should I not go on living in this house?  For a few days I will not go out, that is all.  Is it the end of the world because a person has been killed who ought to have died in the galleys?  Or because the man who tried to kill you was caught in a place that belongs to you?  Tell me that.”

“You cannot stay here,” Marcello repeated a third time.

For a while Regina was silent.  They were both very white and heavy-eyed in the cold daylight, though they could not have slept.  At last she looked at him thoughtfully.

“If we were married, we should go on living in our own house,” she said.  “Is it true, or not?  It is because there will be talking that you are ashamed to let me stay where I am, and would like to get me away.  This is the truth.  I know it.”