He paused, and then, with mingled discretion and pride of knowledge, murmured the explanatory word “Camorra” and shut down the lid.  “A very powerful Camorra,” he breathed out.  “The professors themselves respect it greatly . . . una lira e cinquanti centesimi, Signor Conde.”

Our friend paid with the gold piece.  While Pasquale was making up the change, he observed that the young man, of whom he had heard so much in a few words, was watching the transaction covertly.  After the old vagabond had withdrawn with a bow, the Count settled with the waiter and sat still.  A numbness, he told me, had come over him.

The young man paid, too, got up, and crossed over, apparently for the purpose of looking at himself in the mirror set in the pillar nearest to the Count’s seat.  He was dressed all in black with a dark green bow tie.  The Count looked round, and was startled by meeting a vicious glance out of the corners of the other’s eyes.  The young Cavaliere from Bari (according to Pasquale; but Pasquale is, of course, an accomplished liar) went on arranging his tie, settling his hat before the glass, and meantime he spoke just loud enough to be heard by the Count.  He spoke through his teeth with the most insulting venom of contempt and gazing straight into the mirror.

“Ah!  So you had some gold on you—­you old liar—­you old birba—­you furfante!  But you are not done with me yet.”

The fiendishness of his expression vanished like lightning, and he lounged out of the cafe with a moody, impassive face.

The poor Count, after telling me this last episode, fell back trembling in his chair.  His forehead broke into perspiration.  There was a wanton insolence in the spirit of this outrage which appalled even me.  What it was to the Count’s delicacy I won’t attempt to guess.  I am sure that if he had been not too refined to do such a blatantly vulgar thing as dying from apoplexy in a cafe, he would have had a fatal stroke there and then.  All irony apart, my difficulty was to keep him from seeing the full extent of my commiseration.  He shrank from every excessive sentiment, and my commiseration was practically unbounded.  It did not surprise me to hear that he had been in bed a week.  He had got up to make his arrangements for leaving Southern Italy for good and all.

And the man was convinced that he could not live through a whole year in any other climate!

No argument of mine had any effect.  It was not timidity, though he did say to me once:  “You do not know what a Camorra is, my dear sir.  I am a marked man.”  He was not afraid of what could be done to him.  His delicate conception of his dignity was defiled by a degrading experience.  He couldn’t stand that.  No Japanese gentleman, outraged in his exaggerated sense of honour, could have gone about his preparations for Hara-kiri with greater resolution.  To go home really amounted to suicide for the poor Count.