Corleone - A Tale Of Sicily

Thy asked Orsino, without a smile. It would be as sensible to say that a man who had never seen Borne particular thing, about which he has heard much, might as well put out his eyes. The young priest laughed again, took up the cigar he had laid upon the edge of the piano, puffed at it till it burned freely, and then struck two or three chords of a modulation. A sheet of ruled paper on which several staves of music were roughly jotted down in pencil stood on the rack of the instrument. Oraino stretched out his long legs, leaned back in his low chair, and stared at the old gilded rosettes in the square divisions of the carved ceiling. He was a discontented man, and knew it, which made his discontent a matter for self-reproach, especially as it was quite clear to him that the cause of it lay in himself. He had made two great mistakes at the beginning of life, Wen barely of age, and though neither of them had ultimately produced any serious material consequences, they had affected his naturally melancholic temper and had brought out his inherited hardness of disposition. At the time of the peat building speculatiorls in Rome, several pars earlier, he bad fbolishly involved himself with his fathers old enemy, Ugo del Ferice, and had found himself at last altogether in the latters power, though not in reality his debtor. At the same time, he had fallen very much in love with a. young widow, who, loving him very sincerely ia her turn, but believing, for many reasons, that if she married him she would be doing him an irreparable injury, had sacrificed herself by marrying Del Ferice instead, selling herself to the banker for sinos release, without the latters knowledge. When it was all over, Orsino had found himself -a disappointed man at an age when most young fellows do little more than inexperienced boys, and the serious disposition which he inherited from his mother made it impossible for him to throw off the impression received, and claim the youth, so to speak, which was still his. Since that time, he had been atracted by wornen, but never charmed and thoso that attracted him a were for the most part not marriageable, any more than the few things which sometimes interested and amused him were in any sense profitable. He spent a good deal of money in a careless way, for his father was generous but his rather bitter experience when he had attempted to occupy himself with business had made him cool and clear- headed, so that he never did anything at all ruinous. The hot temper which he had inherited from his father and grandfatber now rarely, if ever, showed itself, and it seemed as though nothing could break through the quiet indifference which had become a second outward nature to him. He had travelled much, of late years, and when he made an effort his conversation was not uninteresting, though the habit of looking at both sides of every question made it cold aad unenthu- siastic. .Perhaps it was a hopeful sign that he generally had a definite opinion ae to which of two views he preferred, though he wodd not take any trouble to convince others that he was right. In his own family, he liked the company of Ippolito best. The latter was about two years younger than he, and very different from him in almost every way. Orsino was tall, strongly built, extremely dark Ippolito was of medium height, delicately made, and almost fair by comparison...