“Be silent!” Sansevero, flushing darkly, flamed into speech.  “Before you dare to criticise the woman who adorns our house!  Here is the truth for you:  I haven’t one cent of private fortune—­I gambled it all away long ago!  More than half of Leonora’s money is lost—­I lost it.  Some of it she paid out for my debts; the greater portion I put into the ’Little Devil’ mine.  I might much better have shoveled it into the Tiber.  Do you know what she has done—­the woman whom you criticise as a bad manager and stigmatize as mean—­I would not care what you said, if you had not thought Leonora mean! Dio mio, MEAN!  Know, then, that the very jewels she wears are false; that the real ones have been sold—­to pay the debts of the man standing before you—­the gambling debts of the head of one of the noblest houses in Italy!”

Giovanni was deeply moved, for this was a wound in his one vulnerable point, his pride of birth.  The cigarette dropped to the floor unheeded.  He moistened his lips as Alessandro continued: 

“They were Leonora’s own jewels that were sold, mark you.  The Sansevero heirlooms will go to your son’s wife intact, as they came to mine!  But that is not all:  I have given my oath to Leonora never again to go into a game of chance, and really I want to keep it!  Yet you know—­no, you don’t; no one can who hasn’t the fever in his veins—­if I see a game, it is as though an unseen force had me in its grip, drawing me against my will; I can’t resist!  At Savini’s I was dining, and I did not know they were going to play—­I won a very little; enough to pay the interest on what I owe Meyer.  But it makes me cold all over to think—­if I had lost!  An enviable inheritance you will get, when it is known what a mess of things the present holder of the title has made!” He dropped into a chair opposite his brother, and buried his face in his hands; between his slim fingers his forehead looked dark, and his temple veins swollen.  For a long time Giovanni sat immovable, staring fixedly, but when at last he broke the silence, he spoke almost lightly: 

“It is not a very charming history that you have given me—­even though it increases my admiration for the woman who has, it seems, been more worthy of the name she bears than has the man who conferred his titles upon her.  I wish you had told me before.”  Then, with a queerly whimsical smile, he said musingly:  “To marry the girl with the golden hair—­and purse?  Not such a terrible fate to look forward to, after all!  She would demand a great deal, and I should have to keep the brakes on.  Still—­that would do me no harm!  You look as though you had been down a sulphur mine.  Come, cheer up—­all may yet be well.”  Suddenly he laughed out loud.  “Funny thing,” he observed further—­“you know, I am not so sure that I am not rather in love.”

He leaned to St. Anthony, and, putting his hand through the dog’s collar beneath the throat, lifted the head on the back of his wrist.  “Tell me, padre, am I in love?  Do you advise the marriage?” The dog put his paw up, fanned the air once in missing, and let it rest on his master’s knee.