But he was so excited himself that he could not stay in his own room. He made one last, fruitless search, and, abandoning the hope of finding the vanished talisman,--hoping that it would appear when he was not thinking about it, as often happens in the case of lost articles,--he determined to go and see Magnani and make peace with him; for they had parted in anger, and Michel, unable to avoid a secret feeling of pride in the thought that the princess was madly in love with him, felt that his generous solicitude for his unfortunate rival redoubled. He crossed the yard and entered Magnani's father's workroom on the ground floor. But he looked in vain for Antonio in his room. His old mother told him that he had gone out a moment before; but could not tell him in what direction he had gone. Michel thereupon strolled into the country, half thinking of overtaking him, half absorbed by his own musings. Meanwhile Magnani, impelled by the same feelings of loyalty and regard, had determined to go and see Michel. His modest dwelling had a second exit, and the one that he took led less directly, through a dark and narrow passage at the rear of the other two houses, to the poor, old-fashioned house which Pier-Angelo occupied with his children. Thus the two young men did not meet. Magnani went upstairs and looked into a large, bare, dilapidated room, where he saw Pier-Angelo stretched out on his cot-bed, in a deep sleep which the emotions of love and youth no longer disturbed. Thereupon Magnani climbed the staircase, or rather the ladder leading to the attics, and entered Michel's chamber, which adjoined Mila's. Michel's door was open; Magnani went in, and, finding no one there, was about to go out again, when the cyclamen, which Michel had carefully placed in an old Venetian glass of curious workmanship, caught his eye. Unquestionably Magnani was the soul of probity, the incarnation of scrupulous honor; and yet it is not certain that, if he had dreamed that that flower had fallen from the princess's bouquet, he would not have stolen it. But it did not occur to him; he concluded simply that Michel, like himself, had a passion for the cyclamen.