ve treated him merely as her best friend;
and he would translate affection to mean love, and another lie would
have been told. There was this, at least, about Guido, that he could not
order her about as Lamberti could. There was no authority in his eyes,
not even when he told her not to catch cold. Perhaps in all the time she
had known him, she had liked him best when he had been angry, at the
garden party, and had demanded to know her secret. But she would not
acknowledge that. If the situation had been reversed and Lamberti,
instead of Guido, had insisted on knowing what she meant to hide, she
could not have helped telling him. It was an abominable state of things,
but there was nothing to be done, and that was the worst part of it.
Lamberti knew Guido much better than she did, and if Lamberti told her
gravely that Guido might do something desperate if she broke with him,
she was obliged to believe it and to act accordingly. There might not be
one chance in a thousand, but the one-thousandth chance was just the one
that might have its turn. One might disregard it for oneself, but one
had no right to overlook it where another's life was concerned. At all
events she must wait till Guido was quite well again, for a man in a
fever really might do anything rash. Why did Lamberti not take away the
revolver that always lay ready in the drawer? It would be much safer,
though Guido probably had plenty of other weapons that would serve the
purpose. Guido was just the kind of pacific man who would have a whole
armoury of guns and pistols, as if he were always expecting to kill
something or somebody. She was sure that Lamberti, who had killed men
with his own hand, did not keep any sort of weapon in his room. If he
had a revolver of his own, it was probably carefully cleaned, greased,
wrapped up and put away with the things he used when he was sent on
expeditions. It was a thousand pities that Guido was not exactly like
Lamberti!

Cecilia rose at last, weary of thinking about it all, disgusted with her
own weakness, and decidedly ill-disposed towards her fellow-creatures.
The slightly flattened upper lip was compressed rather tightly against
the fuller lower one as she went back to find Petersen, and as she held
her head very high, her lids drooped somewhat scornfully over her eyes.
No one can ever be as supercilious as some people look when they are
angry with themselves and are thinking what miserable creatures they
really are.