In
substance these incidents were true enough, but they all dated from
fifteen or twenty years earlier. He secured an eager and interested
audience.
Another member of the company announced as a noteworthy item of news
that an officer of Mantua on a visit to a friend, a neighboring
landowner, had been murdered, and that the robbers had stripped him to
the skin. The story attracted no particular attention, for in those days
such occurrences were far from rare. Casanova resumed his narrative
where it had been interrupted, resumed it as if this Mantua affair
concerned him just as little as it concerned the rest of the company. In
fact, being now freed from a disquiet whose existence he had hardly been
willing to admit even to himself, his manner became brighter and bolder
than ever.
It was past midnight when, after a light-hearted farewell, he walked
alone across the wide, empty square. The heavens were veiled in luminous
mist. He moved with the confident step of a sleep-walker. Without being
really conscious that he was on a path which he had not traversed for
five-and-twenty years, he found the way through tortuous alleys,
between dark houses, and over narrow bridges.
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