even been hinted that he was consumptive.  Corbario would have done better to wait another year or two to see what happened, said a cynic, for young people often died of consumption between fifteen and twenty.  The cynic was answered by a practical woman of the world, who said that Corbario had six years of luxury and extravagance before him, and that many men would have sold themselves to the devil for less.  After the six years the deluge might come if it must; it was much pleasanter to drown in the end than never to have had the chance of swimming in the big stream at all, and bumping sides with the really big fish, and feeling oneself as good as any of them.  Besides, Marcello was pale and thin, and had been heard to cough; he might die before he came of age.  The only objection to this theory was that it was based on a fiction; for the whole fortune had been left to the Signora by a childless relation.

These amiable and interesting views were expressed with variations by people who knew the three persons concerned, and with such a keen sense of appropriate time and place as made it quite sure that none of the three should ever know what was said of them.  The caution of an old fox is rash temerity compared with the circumspection of a first-rate gossip; and when the gossips were tired of discussing Folco Corbario and his wife and her son, they talked about other matters, but they had a vague suspicion that they had been cheated out of something.  A cat that has clawed all the feathers off a stuffed canary might feel just what they did.

For nothing happened.  Corbario did not launch into wild extravagance after all, but behaved himself with the faultless dulness of a model middle-aged husband.  His wife loved him and was perfectly happy, and happiness finally stole her superfluous years away, and they evaporated in the sunshine, and she forgot all about them.  Marcello Consalvi, who had lost his father when he was a mere child, found a friend in his mother’s husband, and became very fond of him, and thought him a good man to imitate; and in return Corbario made a companion of the fair-haired boy, and taught him to ride and shoot in his holidays, and all went well.

Moreover, Marcello’s mother, who was a good woman, told him that the world was very wicked; and with the blind desire for her son’s lasting innocence, which is the most touching instinct of loving motherhood, she entreated him to lead a spotless life.  When Marcello, in the excusable curiosity of budding youth, asked his stepfather what that awful wickedness was against which he was so often warned, Corbario told him true stories of men who had betrayed their country and their friends, and of all sorts of treachery and meanness, to which misdeeds the boy did not feel himself at all inclined; so that he wondered why his mother seemed so very anxious lest he should go astray.  Then he repeated to her what Corbario had told him, and she smiled sweetly and said nothing, and trusted her husband all the more.  She felt that he understood her, and was doing his best to help her in making Marcello what she wished him to be.