ely torpid
and morally listless during the past years. The shock his whole system
had received, the long interval during which his memory had been quite
gone, the physical languor that had lasted some time after his recovery
from the fever, had all combined to make the near past seem infinitely
remote, to cloud his judgment of reality, and to destroy the healthy
tension of his natural will. A good deal of what Corbario had called
"harmless dissipation" had made matters worse, and when Regina had
persuaded him to leave Paris he had really been in that dangerous moral,
intellectual, and physical condition in which it takes very little to
send a man to the bad altogether, and not much more to kill him
outright, if he be of a delicate constitution and still very young.
Corbario had almost succeeded in his work of destruction.

He would not succeed now, for the worst danger was past, and Marcello
had found his feet after being almost lost in the quicksand through
which he had been led.

He had not at first accused Folco of anything worse than that one little
deception about the arrival of the Contessa, and of having caused him to
be too closely watched by Settimia. Little by little, however, other
possibilities had shaped themselves and had grown into certainties at an
alarming rate. He understood all at once how Folco himself had been
spending his time, while society had supposed him to be a broken
hearted widower. A few hints which he had let fall about the things he
would have shown Marcello in Paris suggested a great deal; his looks and
manner told the rest, now that Marcello had guessed the main truth. He
had not waited three months after his wife's death to profit by his
liberty and the wealth she had left him. Marcello remembered the
addresses he had given from time to time--Monte Carlo, Hombourg, Pau,
and Paris very often. He had spoken of business in his letters, as an
excuse for moving about so much, but "business" did not always take a
man to places of amusement, and Folco seemed to have visited no others.
Men whom Marcello had met had seen Corbario, and what they said about
him was by no means indefinite. He had been amusing himself, and not
alone, and the young men had laughed at his attempts to cloak his doings
under an appearance of sorrowing respectability.

As all this became clear to Marcello he suffered acutely at times, and
he reproached himself bitterly for having been so long blind and
indifferent. I