Malipieri laughed a little wildly, and dropped the paper.

“No, my friend,” he said presently, “we would risk our lives for each other, but we are not murderers.  Besides, there is nobody to be killed, unless you will have the goodness to put a bullet through my head.”

And he laughed again, in a way that frightened the quiet man beside him.  What drove him almost mad was that he was powerless.  He longed to lay his hands on the editor of the paper, yet there was not a word, not a suggestion, not an implied allusion for which any man in his senses could have demanded an apology.  It was the plain truth, and nothing else; except that it was adorned by fragmentary panegyrics of himself, which made it even more exasperating if that were possible.  He had not only wrecked Sabina’s reputation by his quixotic folly; he was to be praised to the skies for doing it.

His feverish anger turned into a dull pain that was much worse.  The situation looked utterly hopeless.  Masin stood still beside him watching him with profound concern, and presently took the cup of coffee and held it to his lips.  He drank a little, like a sick man, only half consciously, and drew back, and shook his head.  Masin did not know what to do and waited in mute distress, as a big dog, knowing that his master is in trouble, looks up into his face and feebly wags his sympathetic tail, just a little, at long intervals, and then keeps quite still.

Malipieri gradually recovered his senses enough to think connectedly, and he tried to remember whether he had ever heard of a situation like his own.  As he was neither a novelist nor a critic, he failed, and frankly asked himself whether suicide might not be a way out of the difficulty for Sabina.  He was not an unbeliever, and he had always abhorred and despised the idea of suicide, as most thoroughly healthy men do when it occurs to them; but if at that time he could have persuaded himself that his death could undo the harm he had brought upon Sabina he would not have hesitated a moment.  Neither his body nor his soul could matter much in comparison with her good name.  Hell was full of people who had got there because they had done bad things for their own advantage; if he went there, it would at least not be for that.  He did not think of hell at all, just then, nor of heaven or of anything else that was very far off.  He only thought of Sabina, and if he once wished himself dead for his own sake, he drove the cowardly thought away.  As long as he was alive, he could still do something for her—­surely, there must be something that he could do.  There must be a way out, if he could only use his wits and his strength, as he had made a way out of the vaults, for her to pass through, ten days ago.