The Boy took a handful of gold from his pocket.  “For the poor of your parish, mon pere, if you will be good enough to accept it for them,” said he, with great charm and simplicity of manner.  The old priest flushed with pleasure, saying that he had many poor, and was constantly distressed because he could do so little.  This would be a Godsend.  I glanced at the Italian, and saw that his weary, dark eyes were fixed with a passionate wistfulness upon the gold.  This look, his whole appearance, bespoke poverty, yet he had deliberately refused five thousand francs, a fortune to most men of his condition.  Now that he was vouched for by the priest, extreme curiosity took the place of suspicion in my mind.

I hid the blue cap of the concierge behind my back, in the priest’s house, but the Boy saw it, and saw that I was drenched with rain.  I must have been a figure for laughter, but he did not laugh.  “You see, I was in a hurry,” I excused myself, under a long, comprehending gaze of his.  “It’s your fault if I look an ass.”

“You didn’t stop even to go and get a hat,” he said.  “You came out in the rain just as you were, and you ran—­I heard you running, behind me.  But—­but of course it’s because you’re kind-hearted.  You would have done just the same for anybody.  For—­the Contessa——­”

“Not for the Baronessa, anyhow,” said I.  “I should have stopped for a mackintosh and even goloshes, had her safety been hanging in the balance.”

Then we both laughed, and Stefani, who by this time was showing us the way through the rain to his own home, looked over his shoulder, surprised and self-conscious, as if he feared that we were laughing at him.

On the outskirts of straggling Martigny Bourg, he stopped before a gloomy, grey stone house with four rows of closed wooden shutters, which meant four floors of packed humanity.  Even Martigny has its tenements for poor workers, or those who would be workers if they could, and this was one of them.

We followed Andriolo Stefani up four flights of narrow stone stairs, picking our way by testing each step with a cautious foot, since light there was none.  Arrived at the top floor, we groped along a passage to the back of the house, and our guide opened a door.  There was a yellow haze, which meant one candle-flame fighting for its life in the dark, and we waited outside, while the Italian spoke for a moment to someone we could not see.  There came a note of protest in a woman’s voice, but the man’s beat it down with some argument, and then Stefani returned to ask us in.

Two women sat in a room almost bare of furniture, and both tried to rise on our entrance; but one, who was young as years go, had her lap full of little worn shoes, and the other, who looked older than the allotted span, was nursing a wailing baby, half undressed.