With that brutality to his own feelings of which only a thoroughly sentimental man is capable, he left the Palazzo Conti on the day following the adventure, and took rooms in a hotel in the upper part of the city.  Nothing would have induced him to spend a night in his room since Sabina’s head had lain upon his pillow.  With Volterra’s powerful help, Masin had been released, though poor Sassi had not returned to consciousness, and Malipieri learned that the old man had changed his mind at the last minute, had insisted upon trying to follow Sabina after all, and had fallen heavily upon his head in trying to get down into the first chamber; while Masin, behind him, implored him to come back, or at least to wait for help where he was.  The rest needs no explanation.

Malipieri took a few things with him to the hotel, and left Masin to collect his papers and books on the following day, instructing him to send the scanty furniture, linen and household belongings to the nearest auction rooms, to be sold at once.  Masin, none the worse for a night and day in prison, came back to his functions as if nothing had happened.  He and his master had been in more than one adventure together.  This one was over and he was quite ready for the next.

There was probably not another man in Italy, and there are not many alive anywhere, who would have done what Malipieri did, out of pure sentiment and nothing else.  To him, it seemed like a natural sacrifice to his inward honour, to refuse which would have been cowardly.  He had weakly allowed himself to fall in love with a girl whom he could not possibly marry, and whom he respected as much as he loved.  He guessed, though he tried to deny it, that she was more than half in love with him, since love sometimes comes by halves.  To lie where she had lain, dreaming of her with his aching eyes open and his blood on fire, would be a violation of her maiden privacy, morally not much less cowardly in the spirit than it could have been in the letter, since he could not marry her.

The world laughs at such refinements of delicate feeling in a man, but cannot help inwardly respecting them a little, as it respects many things at which it jeers and rails.  Moreover, Malipieri did not care a fig for the world’s opinion, and if he had needed to take a motto he would have chosen “Si omnes, ego non”; for if there was a circumstance which always inclined him to do anything especially quixotic, it was the conviction that other people would probably do the exact opposite.  So Masin took the furniture to an auction room on a cart, and Malipieri never saw it again.