HE sympathy of the town generally was entirely with Pasqualino in that which had befallen him. It was felt to be intolerable that a boy who had just changed into his best clothes, and taken a carnation from one of the tables in the dining-room to put in his button-hole, and was actually setting off to go down to the Piazza, there to spend the afternoon of the festa, should have been called back by the unsympathetic porter of the Grand Hotel, where he was hall-boy, and be commanded to show the fat white German gentleman down to the bathing-place at the Palazzo a mare and carry his towels and bathing-dress for him. The fat white German gentleman also had preferred, in the unaccountable manner of foreigners, to go all the way on foot, instead of taking a carriage—which would have conveyed him three-quarters of the distance with much saving of time—and, being fat, had walked very slowly along the dusty road, under a large white umbrella, perspiring profusely, and stopping every now and then to sit down, while all the time the precious moments of the afternoon were slipping by, and the Piazza was full of Pasqualino's young friends, male and female, all in their best clothes, conversing and laughing together, and taking little walks, and standing about and smoking an occasional cigarette, in the orthodox manner of spending the holiday of Corpus Domini. Then, after this interminable walk, during which the German gentleman kept asking the infuriated Pasqualino a series of questions in a perfectly unknown tongue, and appeared singularly annoyed when the boy was unable to answer him, he drew three coppers from his pocket, and, after a prolonged mental struggle, presented him with two of them. He then undressed and swam majestically away round the promontory of rock that bounded the beach. An hour afterwards, Pasqualino, defrauded of half his holiday afternoon, returned to the gaiety and companionship of the Piazza, and recounted to an indignant audience his outrageous employment.
He returned to the Grand Hotel in time to get into his livery again before dinner, and was instantly summoned into the manager's bureau, where he was confronted with his odious taskmaster of the afternoon, and charged with having picked his pocket while he was bathing. A portfolio was missing, containing a note for a hundred francs, which the German gentleman was gutturally certain that he had on his person when he started off to bathe, and which he found he had lost when he began to dress for dinner. His certainty was partly founded on the fact that he had tipped the boy when they arrived at the Palazzo a mare, and that to have tipped him he must have had money in his pocket. In answer, Pasqualino absolutely denied the charge, and then made a dreadful mistake by suggesting that the Signore had a hole in his pocket, through which the portfolio had slipped. This was quite the most unfortunate thing he could possibly have said, for, as the German gentleman instantly demonstrated, it was perfectly true. But how, so he overpoweringly urged, could Pasqualino have known there was a hole there unless he had been examining his pockets? And an hour later, with gyves upon his wrists, he was solemnly and ignominiously led through the Piazza, all blazing with brilliant acetylene lights, and resonant with the sound of the band, and clapped into prison, there to await the formal charge.
Arrived there, he was searched, and a similar examination was made in his room at his mother's house, where he went to sleep at night, but nothing that ever so remotely resembled a portfolio or a hundred franc note was found, and still he steadfastly denied the charge. Then the key was turned on him, and through the small, high, grated window he could hear the entrancing blare of the band. Later, by standing on his board bed, he could see the fiery segment of the aspiring path of the rockets, as they were let off from the rocky eminence above the Piazza, and listen to the echo of their explosions flap and buffet against the cliffs of Monte Gennaro.