According to the Neapolitan cook—­who warmed up for the street-walkers of the Rue Froid-Manteau the fragments left from the most sumptuous dinners in Paris—­Signora Gambara had gone off to Italy with a Milanese nobleman, and no one knew what had become of her.  Worn out with fifteen years of misery, she was very likely ruining the Count by her extravagant luxury, for they were so devotedly adoring, that in all his life, Giardini could recall no instance of such a passion.

Towards the end of that very January, one evening when Giardini was chatting with a girl who had come to buy her supper, about the divine Marianna—­so poor, so beautiful, so heroically devoted, and who had, nevertheless, “gone the way of them all,” the cook, his wife, and the street-girl saw coming towards them a woman fearfully thin, with a sunburned, dusty face; a nervous walking skeleton, looking at the numbers, and trying to recognize a house.

“Ecco la Marianna!” exclaimed the cook.

Marianna recognized Giardini, the erewhile cook, in the poor fellow she saw, without wondering by what series of disasters he had sunk to keep a miserable shop for secondhand food.  She went in and sat down, for she had come from Fontainebleau.  She had walked fourteen leagues that day, after begging her bread from Turin to Paris.

She frightened that terrible trio!  Of all her wondrous beauty nothing remained but her fine eyes, dimmed and sunken.  The only thing faithful to her was misfortune.

She was welcomed by the skilled old instrument mender, who greeted her with unspeakable joy.

“Why, here you are, my poor Marianna!” said he, warmly.  “During your absence they sold up my instrument and my operas.”

It would have been difficult to kill the fatted calf for the return of the Samaritan, but Giardini contributed the fag end of a salmon, the trull paid for wine, Gambara produced some bread, Signora Giardini lent a cloth, and the unfortunates all supped together in the musician’s garret.

When questioned as to her adventures, Marianna would make no reply; she only raised her beautiful eyes to heaven and whispered to Giardini: 

“He married a dancer!”

“And how do you mean to live?” said the girl.  “The journey has ruined you, and——­”

“And made me an old woman,” said Marianna.  “No, that is not the result of fatigue or hardship, but of grief.”

“And why did you never send your man here any money?” asked the girl.

Marianna’s only answer was a look, but it went to the woman’s heart.

“She is proud with a vengeance!” she exclaimed.  “And much good it has done her!” she added in Giardini’s ear.