He examined the guns admiringly.  There were rows of daggers along shelves; some in sheath, others bare; one that had been hastily wiped showed a smear of ropy blood.  He stood debating whether he should seize a sword for his protection.  In the act of trying its temper on the floor, the sword-hilt was knocked from his hand, and he felt a coil of arms around him.  He was in the imprisoning embrace of Barto Rizzo’s wife.  His first, and perhaps natural, impression accused her of a violent display of an eccentric passion for his manly charms; and the tighter she locked him, the more reasonably was he held to suppose it; but as, while stamping on the floor, she offered nothing to his eyes save the yellow poll of her neck, and hung neither panting nor speaking, he became undeceived.  His struggles were preposterous; his lively sense of ridicule speedily stopped them.  He remained passive, from time to time desperately adjuring his living prison to let him loose, or to conduct him whither he had come; but the inexorable coil kept fast—­how long there was no guessing—­till he could have roared out tears of rage, and that is extremity for an Englishman.  Rinaldo arrived in his aid; but the woman still clung to him.  He was freed only by the voice of Barto Rizzo, who marched him back.  Rinaldo subsequently told him that his discovery of the armoury necessitated his confinement.

“Necessitates it!” cried Wilfrid.  “Is this your Italian gratitude?”

The other answered:  “My friend, you risked your fortune for my brother; but this is a case that concerns our country.”

He deemed these words to be an unquestionable justification, for he said no more.  After this they ceased to converse.

Each lay down on his strip of couch-matting; rose and ate, and passed the dreadful untamed hours; nor would Wilfrid ask whether it was day or night.  We belong to time so utterly, that when we get no note of time, it wears the shrouded head of death for us already.  Rinaldo could quit the place as he pleased; he knew the hours; and Wilfrid supposed that it must be hatred that kept him from voluntarily divulging that blessed piece of knowledge.  He had to encourage a retorting spirit of hatred in order to mask his intense craving.  By an assiduous calculation of seconds and minutes, he was enabled to judge that the lamp burned a space of six hours before it required replenishing.  Barto Rizzo’s wife trimmed it regularly, but the accursed woman came at all seasons.  She brought their meals irregularly, and she would never open her lips:  she was like a guardian of the tombs.  Wilfrid abandoned his dream of the variation of night and day, and with that the sense of life deadened, as the lamp did toward the sixth hour.  Thenceforward his existence fed on the movements of his companion, the workings of whose mind he began to read with a marvellous insight.  He knew once, long in advance of the act or an indication of it, that Rinaldo was bent on prayer.  Rinaldo had slightly