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 gold on you—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 café with a moody, impassive face.

The poor Count, when telling me this last episode, trembled and fell back in his chair. His forehead broke into perspiration. There was an extravagance of wantonness in this outrage which appalled even me. What it was to the Count’s delicacy I can’t imagine. I am sure that if he had not been too refined, too correct to do such a blatantly vulgar thing as dying from apoplexy in a café, he would have had a fatal stroke there and then. But, irony apart, all my difficulty was to keep him from seeing the 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. Then he got up to make his arrangements for leaving Southern Italy at once and for ever.

And he was convinced that he could not live a whole twelve months in any other climate!

No argument I could advance 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. To be so marked hurt his delicate conception of life’s ease and serenity. He couldn’t stand it. No Japanese gentleman, outraged in his exaggerated sense of honour, could have gone about his preparations for Hara-kiri with greater resolution. For it really amounted to that with the Count. He was going, and there was an end of it. He was going the very next day—to die on his estate, I suppose, as if the infamy of that outrage had tainted beyond endurance the idle dignity of his life.

There is a saying of Neapolitan patriotism intended for the information of foreigners, I presume: See Naples and then die. It is a saying of excessive vanity, and everything excessive was abhorrent to the nice moderation of the poor Count. Yet, as I was seeing him off at the railway station, I thought he was behaving with singular fidelity to its conceited spirit. He had seen Naples. He had seen it completely. He had seen it with a startling thoroughness—and now he was going to his grave. He was going to it by the train de luxe of the International Sleeping Car Company, via Trieste and Vienna. As the four long, sombre coaches pulled out of the station I raised my hat with a queer sensation of paying a last tribute of respect to a funeral cortège. Il Conde’s profile, much aged already and stonily still, glided away from me behind the lighted pane of glass—Vedi Napoli e poi mori.