ating yourself in this way? Come on and get dressed."
Don Rocco looked at him, reddened up to the top of his head, narrowed his tear-wet eyes in a smile, which meant: "Now it will be your turn to laugh."
"I have no clothes," he said.
"What?"
The professor added to this word a gesture which meant, "Did she carry them away?" Don Rocco responded also by a mere nod; and seeing that his friend with difficulty restrained a burst of laughter, he also tried to laugh.
"Poor Don Rocco," said the professor, and added, still with a laugh in his throat, heartfelt words of sympathy, of comfort, and asked for every detail of what had happened. "Oh, if you had only listened to me!" he concluded. "If you had only sent her away!"
"Yes," said Don Rocco, accepting even this with humiliation. "You are right. And now what will the countess say?"
The professor sighed.
"What can I say, my son? She will say nothing. This also has happened, that your successor wrote yesterday that he had definitively gotten rid of his present engagements and was at the disposal of the countess."
Don Rocco was silent, heart-broken. "I must look at the time," said he, after a moment's
