In all the parties of pleasure I formed, and these were many--my wife and Ferrari were included as a matter of course. At first Nina demurred, with some plaintive excuse concerning her "recent terrible bereavement," but I easily persuaded her out of this. I even told some ladies I knew to visit her and add their entreaties to mine, as I said, with the benignant air of an elderly man, that it was not good for one so young to waste her time and injure her health by useless grieving. She saw the force of this, I must admit, with admirable readiness, and speedily yielded to the united invitations she received, though always with a well-acted reluctance, and saying that she did so merely "because the Count Oliva was such an old friend of the family and knew my poor dear husband as a child."
On Ferrari I heaped all manner of benefits. Certain debts of his contracted at play I paid privately to surprise him--his gratitude was extreme. I humored him in many of his small extravagances--I played with his follies as an angler plays the fish at the end of his line, and I succeeded in winning his confidence. Not that I ever could surprise him into a confession of his guilty amour--but he kept me well informed as to what he was pleased to call "the progress of his attachment," and supplied me with many small details which, while they fired my blood and brain to wrath, steadied me more surely in my plan of vengeance. Little did he dream in whom he was trusting!--little did he know into whose hands he was playing! Sometimes a kind of awful astonishment would come over me as I listened to his trivial talk, and heard him make plans for a future that was never to be. He seemed so certain of his happiness--so absolutely sure that nothing could or would intervene to mar it. Traitor as he was he was unable to foresee punishment--materialist to the heart's core, he had no knowledge of the divine law of compensation. Now and then a dangerous impulse stirred me--a desire to say to him point-blank: "You are a condemned criminal--a doomed man on the brink of the grave. Leave this light converse and frivolous jesting--and, while there is time, prepare for death!"
But I bit my lips and kept stern silence. Often, too, I felt disposed to seize him by the throat, and, declaring my identity, accuse him of his treachery to his face, but I always remembered and controlled myself. One point in his character I knew well--I had known it of old--this was his excessive love of good wine. I aided and abetted him in this weakness, and whenever he visited me I took care that he should have his choice of the finest vintages. Often after a convivial evening spent in my apartments with a few other young men of his class and caliber, he reeled out of my presence, his deeply flushed face and thick voice bearing plain testimony as to his condition. On these occasions I used to consider with a sort of fierce humor how Nina would receive him--for though she saw no offense in the one kind of vice she herself practiced, she had a particular horror of vulgarity in any form, and drunkenness was one of those low failings she specially abhorred.