already leaping like a fish
at the smell of this hole. You brute bear! it's a smell of bones. It
turns my inside with a spoon. May the devil seize you when you're
sleeping! You shan't go: I'll tell you everything--everything. I can't
tell you anything more than I have told you. She gave me a
cigarette--there! Now you know:--gave me a cigarette; a cigarette. I
smoked it--there! Your faithful servant!"

"She gave you a cigarette, and you smoked it; ha!" said Barto Rizzo, who
appeared to see something to weigh even in that small fact. "The English
lady gave you the cigarette?"

Luigi nodded: "Yes;" pertinacious in deception. "Yes," he repeated; "the
English lady. That was the person. What's the use of your skewering me
with your eyes!"

"I perceive that you have never travelled, my Luigi," said Barto. "I am
afraid we shall not part so early as I had supposed. I double the dose,
and return to you in four hours' time."

Luigi threw himself flat on the ground, shrieking that he was ready to
tell everything--anything. Not even the apparent desperation of his
circumstances could teach him that a promise to tell the truth was a more
direct way of speaking. Indeed, the hitting of the truth would have
seemed to him a sort of artful archery, the burden of which should
devolve upon the questioner, whom he supplied with the relation of
"everything and anything."

All through a night Luigi's lesson continued. In the morning he was still
breaking out in small and purposeless lies; but Barto Rizzo had
accomplished his two objects: that of squeezing him, and that of
subjecting his imagination. Luigi confessed (owing to a singular recovery
of his memory) the gift of the cigarette as coming from the Signorina
Vittoria. What did it matter if she did give him a cigarette?

"You adore her for it?" said Barto.

"May the Virgin sweep the floor of heaven into her lap!" interjected
Luigi. "She is a good patriot."

"Are you one?" Barto asked.

"Certainly I am."

"Then I shall have to suspect you, for the good of your country."

Luigi could not see the deduction. He was incapable of guessing that it
might apply forcibly to Vittoria, who had undertaken a grave, perilous,
and imminent work. Nothing but the spontaneous desire to elude the
pursuit of a questioner had at first instigated his baffling of Barto
Rizzo, until, fearing the dark square man himself, he feared him dimly
for Vittoria's sake; he could not have said why. She was a g