"You see, my brother has something in his make-up that appeals to a woman. I was going to say, all women. There's something spectacular, you might say, in the way he carries on. I've never been able to decide whether it's intentional or just fate. Anyhow, there it is; and if you look at it in that light, it isn't so very wonderful after all that a girl like Rosa was then should have been dazzled and carried away. When she jumped up and stood staring at me, I hardly knew what to do. 'Rosa!' I said, and we stood facing each other for a while. I don't know; but I think we got to know each other better just then. For me, at any rate, it was a revelation. They say a drowning man sees all his past life while the water is pressing on his ear-drums. Something like that happened to me then in that dismal, badly-lighted booking-hall. It wasn't love, in the sugary sentimental sense, that I felt for Rosa; but a blind, helpless sort of an emotion, a feeling that if I didn't get her I was lost--lost! I put out my hands as though I was catching hold of something to hold me up ... I felt her hands. "I can hardly remember how we went away from there. I know the driver shouted to me as we came out and I went up and paid him. And then we were in the _Piazza Corvetto_, sitting on a seat, near where the trolley-cars stop. How long we sat there I don't know either. I knew I'd got her again. She was there, alongside, and we were talking, like two children. I was very glad ... you know." He paused, and we went on smoking and sipping, and Bill bent her head over her needlework. I thought with a sudden and revealing vividness of the woman who had said to me, in her gentle Italian voice, "He is a good man." I think we were very glad too, though we did not say so. "I can't tell you," he went on evenly, "whether my brother intended to take her away with him and was prevented by some accident, or whether he had changed his mind. I think he intended to. I can tell you what I did myself. Before I left Genoa I married Rosa. She wanted it. She did not trust herself. There are men like that. Women cannot trust themselves unless some man will trust them. "When we sailed out of Genoa bound for Buenos Ayres, I was a married man, and Rosa had a flat in _Via Palestro_. I thought I knew my brother well enough to feel sure that I needn't fear him any more. That's the strange part of a business like that. To Rosa, to me, it was life or death; to my brother it was the amusement of a few hours, days, perhaps a week. It's a queer world.