“To sing a particular song?”

“Lots of them! ay-ay!”

Barto took him by the shoulder and pressed him into his seat till he howled, saying, “Now, there’s a slate and a pencil.  Expect me at the end of two hours, this time.  Next time it will be four:  then eight, then sixteen.  Find out how many hours that will be at the sixteenth examination.”

Luigi flew at the torturer and stuck at the length of his straightened arm, where he wriggled, refusing to listen to the explanation of Barto’s system; which was that, in cases where every fresh examination taught him more, they were continued, after regularly-lengthening intervals, that might extend from the sowing of seed to the ripening of grain.  “When all’s delivered,” said Barto, “then we begin to correct discrepancies.  I expect,” he added, “you and I will have done before a week’s out.”

“A week!” Luigi shouted.  “Here’s my stomach 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.