‘I will put you down at the door of Casa Dietrich, Signor Oriole. You know that I do not return there.’ ‘Nor I,’ was the curt response. ‘You can spare yourself the trouble. I will get out where our ways part.’ ‘You do not return?’ she cried, astonished. ‘I? Never; if it is intolerable for you, what do you suppose it must be for me? I told Signora Dietrich some weeks ago, “The day you marry the child to the Australian, I shake the dust of your house from my feet.” She laughed at me, and said, “Bene!” Not long before, when I thought, for other reasons, of going away, she almost went on her knees to me to beg me to remain.’ It was the only allusion he had ever made to any words that might have passed between him and Signora Dietrich. Minna knew instinctively that only strong excitement had called it forth. ‘But--but----’ she stammered, for there came with vivid clearness to her mind the fact that he was exceedingly poor; had a salary of some seventy or eighty pounds a year, all told, and that but for the home at Casa Dietrich, which, it is true, he paid for with his heart’s blood, he must have been reduced to absolute indigence. She felt a chill at her very heart. ‘Where do you go, if I may venture to ask?’ she inquired. ‘To a little lodging which I have taken. It does not matter where it is,’ said he calmly, but with a certain pride at the same time. ‘It is no place where I could ask any of my friends to come and see me. Do not think I am complaining,’ he went on with perfect self-possession; ‘it is just. I have merited it. My own weakness, my own selfishness and folly, taking a shape of which I will not speak to you, have placed me in the pitiable, the contemptible position in which you see me to-day. It is true, I have been punished already many years for my sin. It is equally true that no number of years of expiation could sufficiently atone for it. I stayed, like you, signora, to the last moment, in the futile hope that something might happen--to be near her till the end. Nay, more,’ he added, sinking his voice, ‘I called her to me one day not long ago, and I told her that, if she chose to confront the risk and the misery of it, I would go away with her--fly, in fact, from that house and from her fate, and would work for her as for my daughter, would never desert her till life deserted me. But she would not. She said she thanked me for what I offered, and trusted me, but that it would not make things much better; it would not give her her mother again. I knew then that this thing would happen. Of course such things do happen, and worse, if there can be any worse. Nothing is too ghastly to be true. Now I have lost her--it is merely continuing my life alone.’