“Are you the owner of this place?” I asked.

“Si, signor!”

“What has become of the old man who used to live here?”

He laughed, shrugged his shoulders, and drew his pipe-stem across his throat with a significant gesture.

“So, signor!—­with a sharp knife!  He had a good deal of blood, too, for so withered a body.  To kill himself in that fashion was stupid:  he spoiled an Indian shawl that was on his bed, worth more than a thousand francs.  One would not have thought he had so much blood.”

And the fellow put back his pipe in his mouth and smoked complacently.  I heard in sickened silence.

“He was mad, I suppose?” I said at last.

The long pipe was again withdrawn.

“Mad?  Well, the people say so.  I for one think he was very reasonable—­all except that matter of the shawl—­he should have taken that off his bed first.  But he was wise enough to know that he was of no use to anybody—­he did the best he could!  Did you know him, signor?”

“I gave him money once,” I replied, evasively; then taking out a few francs I handed them to this evil-eyed, furtive-looking son of Israel, who received the gift with effusive gratitude.

“Thank you for your information,” I said coldly.  “Good-day.”

“Good-day to you, signor,” he replied, resuming his seat and watching me curiously as I turned away.

I passed out of the wretched street feeling faint and giddy.  The end of the miserable rag-dealer been told to me briefly and brutally enough—­yet somehow I was moved to a sense of regret and pity.  Abjectly poor, half crazy, and utterly friendless, he had been a brother of mine in the same bitterness and irrevocable sorrow.  I wondered with a half shudder—­would my end be like his?  When my vengeance was completed should I grow shrunken, and old, and mad, and one lurid day draw a sharp knife across my throat as a finish to my life’s history?  I walked more rapidly to shake off the morbid fancies that thus insidiously crept in on my brain; and as before, the noise and glitter of the Toledo had been unbearable, so now I found it a relief and a distraction.  Two maskers bedizened in violet and gold whizzed past me like a flash, one of them yelling a stale jest concerning la nnamorata—­a jest I scarcely heard, and certainly had no heart or wit to reply to.  A fair woman I knew leaned out of a gayly draped balcony and dropped a bunch of roses at my feet; out of courtesy I stooped to pick them up, and then raising my hat I saluted the dark-eyed donor, but a few paces on I gave them away to a ragged child.  Of all flowers that bloom, they were, and still are, the most insupportable to me.  What is it the English poet Swinburne says—­

  “I shall never be friends again with roses!”