He shrugged his shoulders. “Rumour’s habit is to lie,” he answered. “Yet for such a lie as that, so monstrous an imagination would be needed that, rather, am I inclined to account it truth. There are no more poets in Pesaro since you left. But at what hour was it that you quitted the city?”
To hesitate again were to betray myself; it were to suggest that I was seeking an answer that should sort well with the rest of my story. Besides, what could the hour signify?
“It would be about the first hour of night,” I said. He looked at me with increasing strangeness.
“You must indeed have wandered from your road to have got no farther than this in all that time. Perhaps you were hampered by some heavy burden?” He leered evilly, and I turned cold.
“I was burdened with nothing heavier than this body of mine and a rather uneasy conscience.”
“Where, then, have you tarried?”
At this I thought it time to rebel. Were I too meekly to submit to this examination, my very meekness might afford him fresh grounds for doubts.
“Once have I told you,” I answered wearily, “that I lost my way. And, however much it may flatter me to have your Excellency evincing such an interest in my concerns, I am at a loss to find a reason for it.”
He leered prodigiously once more, and his eyebrows shot up to the level of his cap.
“I will tell you, brute beast,” he answered me. “I question you because I suspect that you are hiding something from me.”