Rather a long speech at such a moment, an older woman would have thought, and not over original in choice of similes and epithets, but fluent enough and good enough to serve the purpose and to turn the current of Beatrice’s girlish life.  Yet not much of a love-speech.  Ruggiero’s had been better, as a little true steel is better than much iron at certain moments in life.  It succeeded very well at the moment, but its ultimate success would have been surer if it had reached no ears but Beatrice’s.  Neither she nor San Miniato were aware that a few feet below them a man was lying on his back, with white face and clenched hands, staring at the pale moonlit sky above him, and listening in stony despair to every word that was spoken.

The sight would have disturbed them, had they seen it, though they both were fearless by nature and not easily startled.  Had Beatrice seen Ruggiero at that moment, she would have learned once and for ever the difference between real passion and its counterfeit.  But Ruggiero knew where he was and had no intention of betraying himself by voice or movement.  He suffered almost all that a man can suffer by the heart alone, but he was strong and could bear torture.

The hardest of all was that he understood the real truth, partly by instinct and partly through what he knew of his master.  Those rough southern sailors sometimes have a wonderful keenness in discovering the meaning of their masters’ doings.  Ruggiero held the key to the situation.  He knew that San Miniato was poor and that the Marchesa was very rich.  He knew very well that San Miniato was not at all in love, for he knew what love really meant, and he could see how the Count always acted by calculation and never from impulse.  Best of all he saw that Beatrice was a mere child who was being deceived by the coolly assumed passion of a veteran woman-killer.  It was bitterly hard to bear.  And he had felt a foreboding of it all in the afternoon—­and he wished that he had risked all and brought down the brass tiller on San Miniato’s head and submitted to be sent to the galleys for life.  He could never have forgotten Beatrice; but San Miniato could never have married her, and that satisfaction would have made chains light and hard labour a pastime.

It was too late to think of such things now.  Had he yielded to the first murderous impulse, it would have been better.  But he had never struck a man from behind and he knew that he could not do it in cold blood.  Yet how much better it would have been!  He would not be lying now on the rock, holding his breath and clenching his fists, listening to his Excellency the Count of San Miniato’s love making.  By this time the Count of San Miniato would be cold, and he, Ruggiero, would be handcuffed and locked up in the little barrack of the gendarmes at Sorrento, and Beatrice with her mother would be recovering from their fright as best they could in the rooms at the hotel, and Teresina would be crying,