He thought of the moody, well-dressed young man, with whom he had exchanged glances in the crowd around the bandstand, and who, he felt confident, was the robber. Would he recognise him again? Doubtless. But he did not want ever to see him again. The best thing was to forget this humiliating episode.

The Count looked round anxiously for the coming of his risotto, and, behold! to the left against the wall—there was the young man! He sat alone at a table, with a bottle of some sort of wine or syrup and a carafe of iced water before him. The smooth olive cheeks, the red lips, the little jet-black moustache turned up gallantly, the fine black eyes a little heavy and shaded by long eyelashes, that peculiar expression of cruel discontent which is seen only in the busts of some Roman emperors—it was he, no doubt at all. But that was a type. The Count looked away hastily. The young officer over there reading a paper was like that, too. Same type. Two young men further away playing draughts also resembled—

The Count lowered his head with the fear in his heart of being everlastingly haunted by the vision of that young man. He began to eat his risotto. Presently he heard the young man on his left call the waiter in a bad-tempered tone.

At the call, not only his own waiter, but two other idle waiters belonging to quite a different row of tables, rushed towards him with obsequious alacrity, which is not the general characteristic of the waiters in the Café Umberto. The young man muttered something, and one of the waiters walking rapidly to the nearest door called out loudly into the Galleria ‘Pasquale!’

Everybody knows Pasquale, the sordid old fellow who, shuffling between the tables, offers for sale cigars, cigarettes, picture postcards, matches to the clients of the café. He is otherwise an engaging scoundrel. The Count saw the grey-haired, unshaven, sallow ruffian enter the café in his shabby clothes, the glass case hanging from his neck by a leather strap, and, at a word from the waiter, make his shuffling way with a sudden spurt to the young man’s table. The young man was in need of a cigar with which Pasquale served him fawningly. The old pedlar was going out, when the Count, on a sudden impulse, beckoned to him.

Pasquale approached, his smile of deferential recognition combing oddly with the ironic searching expression of the eyes. Leaning his case on the table, he lifted the glass lid without a word. The Count took a box of cigarettes and, urged by a fearful curiosity, asked as casually as he could:

‘Tell me, Pasquale, who is that young signor over there?’

The other bent over his box at once.

‘That, Signor Count,’ he said begining to rearrange his wares busily and without looking up, ‘that is a young cavaliere of a very good family from Bari.^* He studies in the university, and is the chief, capo, of an association of young men—of very nice young men.’

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 cinquante 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 so very 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 a pillar just behind 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