The trial opened.
She was called and under oath stated that for more than a year her father-in-law had been her lover.
Tito was declared insane and sent to an asylum.
Laura wanted to leave Florence at once, but in Italy the preliminaries to a trial are endless and by then she was near her time.
The Hardings insisted on her remaining with them till she was confined.
She had a child, a boy, but it only lived twenty-four hours.
Her plan was to go back to San Francisco and live with her mother till she could find a job, for Tito's extravagance, the money she had spent on the villa, and then the cost of the trial had seriously impoverished her.
It was Harding who told me most of this; but one day when he was at the club and I was having a cup of tea with Bessie and we were again talking over these tragic happenings she said to me:
'You know, Charley hasn't told you the whole story because he doesn't know it.
I never told him.
Men are funny in some ways; they're much more easily shocked than women.'
I raised my eyebrows, but said nothing.
'Just before Laura went away we had a talk.
She was very low and I thought she was grieving over the loss of her baby. I wanted to say something to help her.
"You mustn't take the baby's death too hardly," I said.
"As things are, perhaps it's better it died."
"Why?" she said.
"Think what the poor little thing's future would have been with a murderer for his father."
She looked at me for a moment in that strange quiet way of hers. And then what d'you think she said?'
'I haven't a notion,' said I.
'She said:
"What makes you think his father was a murderer?"
'I felt myself grow as red as a turkey-cock.
I could hardly believe my ears.
"Laura, what do you mean?" I said.
"You were in court," she said.
"You heard me say Carlo was my lover."'
Bessie Harding stared at me as she must have stared at Laura.
'What did you say then?' I asked.
'What was there for me to say?
I said nothing.
I wasn't so much horrified, I was bewildered.
Laura looked at me and, believe it or not, I'm convinced there was a twinkle in her eyes.
I felt a perfect fool.'
'Poor Bessie,' I smiled.
Poor Bessie, I repeated to myself now as I thought of this strange story.
She and Charley were long since dead and by their death I had lost good friends.
I went to sleep then, and next day Wyman Holt took me for a long drive.
We were to dine with the Greenes at seven and we reached their house on the dot.
Now that I had remembered who Laura was I was filled with an immense curiosity to see her again.
Wyman had exaggerated nothing.
The living-room into which we went was the quintessence of commonplace. It was comfortable enough, but there was not a trace of personality in it. It might have been furnished en bloc by a mail-order house.
It had the bleakness of a government office.
I was introduced first to my host Jasper Greene and then to his brother Emery and to his brother's wife Fanny.
Jasper Greene was a large, plump man with a moon face and a shock of black, coarse, unkempt hair.
He wore large cellulose-rimmed spectacles.
I was staggered by his youth. He could not have been much over thirty and was therefore nearly twenty years younger than Laura.
His brother, Emery, a composer and teacher in a New York school of music, might have been seven or eight and twenty.
His wife, a pretty little thing, was an actress for the moment out of a job.
Jasper Greene mixed us some very adequate cocktails but for a trifle too much vermouth, and we sat down to dinner.