"Si, signora."
"Many times?"
"Si, signora."
"Have you ever noticed that he was tired in the sea, or afterwards, or that bathing seemed to make him ill in any way?"
"Tired, signora?"
"You know there's a thing, in English we call it cramp. Sometimes it seizes the best swimmers. It's a dreadful pain, I believe, and the limbs refuse to move. You've never—when he's been swimming with you, the padrone has never had anything of that kind, has he? It wasn't that which made you frightened this evening when he didn't come?"
She had unwittingly given the boy the chance to save her from any worse suspicion. With Sicilian sharpness he seized it. Till now he had been in a dilemma, and it was that which had made him sullen, almost rude. His position was a difficult one. He had to keep his padrone's confidence. Yet he could not—physically he could not—stay on the mountain when he knew that some tragedy was probably being enacted, or had already been enacted by the sea. He was devoured by an anxiety which he could not share and ought not to show because it was caused by the knowledge which he was solemnly pledged to conceal. This remark of Hermione gave him a chance of shifting it from the shoulders of the truth to the shoulders of a lie. He remembered the morning of sirocco, his fear, his passion of tears in the boat. The memory seemed almost to make the lie he was going to tell the truth.
"Si, signora. It was that."
His voice was no longer sullen.
"The padrone had an attack like that?"