"Ladro! Vigiliacco!" Words of no uncertain meaning flowed from his
overcharged heart. His whole hot nature was aroused. His spirit was up
in arms. And now, almost for the first time, he drew a comparison
between his age and Emilio's. Emilio was an old man. He realized it.
Why had he never realized it before? Was he, full of youth, beauty,
chivalrous energy and devotion, to be interfered with, set aside, for
a man with gray hairs thick upon his head, for a man who spent half
his hours bent over a writing-table? Emilio had never wished him to
know the ladies of the island. He knew the reason now, and glowed with
a fiery lust of battle. Vere had attracted him from the first. But
this opposition drove on attraction into something stronger, more
determined. He said to himself that he was madly in love. Never yet
had he been worsted in an amour by any man. The blood surged to his
head at the mere thought of being conquered in the only battle of life
worth fighting--the battle for a woman, and by a man of more than
twice his age, a man who ought long ago to have been married and have
had children as old as the Signorina Vere.

Well, he had been a good friend to Emilio. Now Emilio should see that
the good friend could be the good enemy. Late that night, as he sat
alone in front of the Caffe Turco smoking innumerable cigarettes, he
resolved to show these foreigners the stuff a Neapolitan was made of.
They did not know. Poor, ignorant beings from cold England, drowned
forever in perpetual yellow fogs, and from France, country of
volatility but not of passion, they did not know what the men of the
South, of a volcanic soil, were capable of, once they were roused,
once their blood spoke and their whole nature responded! It was time
they learned. And he would undertake to teach them. As he drove
towards dawn up the dusty hill to Capodimonte he was in a fever of