Luigi was always too full of his own cunning to suspect the same in another, until he was left alone to reflect on a scene; when it became overwhelmingly transparent.  “But, what could I say more than I did say?” he asked himself, as he stared at the one lamp Barto had left.  Finding the door unfastened, he took the lamp and lighted himself out, and along a cavernous passage ending in a blank wall, against which his heart knocked and fell, for his sensation was immediately the terror of imprisonment and helplessness.  Mad with alarm, he tried every spot for an aperture.  Then he sat down on his haunches; he remembered hearing word of Barto Rizzo’s rack:—­certain methods peculiar to Barto Rizzo, by which he screwed matters out of his agents, and terrified them into fidelity.  His personal dealings with Barto were of recent date; but Luigi knew him by repute:  he knew that the shoemaking business was a mask.  Barto had been a soldier, a schoolmaster:  twice an exile; a conspirator since the day when the Austrians had the two fine Apples of Pomona, Lombardy and Venice, given them as fruits of peace.  Luigi remembered how he had snapped his fingers at the name of Barto Rizzo.  There was no despising him now.  He could only arrive at a peaceful contemplation of Barto Rizzo’s character by determining to tell all, and (since that seemed little) more than he knew.  He got back to the leather-smelling chamber, which was either the same or purposely rendered exactly similar to the one he had first been led to.

At the end of a leaden hour Barto Rizzo returned.

“Now, to recommence,” he said.  “Drink before you speak, if your tongue is dry.”

Luigi thrust aside the mention of liquor.  It seemed to him that by doing so he propitiated that ill-conceived divinity called Virtue, who lived in the open air, and desired men to drink water.  Barto Rizzo evidently understood the kind of man he was schooling to his service.

“Did that Austrian officer, who is an Englishman, acquainted with the Signor Antonio-Pericles, meet the lady, his sister, on the Motterone?”

Luigi answered promptly, “Yes.”

“Did the Signorina Vittoria speak to the lady?”

“No.”

“Not a word?”

“No.”

“Not one communication to her?”

“No:  she sat under her straw hat.”

“She concealed her face?”

“She sat like a naughty angry girl.”

“Did she speak to the officer?”

“Not she!”

“Did she see him?”

“Of course she did!  As if a woman’s eyes couldn’t see through straw-plait!”

Barto paused, calculatingly, eye on victim.

“The Signorina Vittoria,” he resumed, “has engaged to sing on the night of the Fifteenth; has she?”

A twitching of Luigi’s muscles showed that he apprehended a necessary straining of his invention on another tack.

“On the night of the Fifteenth, Signor Barto Rizzo?  That’s the night of her first appearance.  Oh, yes!”