'Only twenty-nine?' Zoë affected great surprise. 'I should have thought you were much, much older! Are you quite sure?' 'Yes.' Carlo laughed. 'I am quite sure. But I suppose I seem very old to you.' 'Oh yes! Very!' She nodded gravely as she spoke. 'You are seventeen, are you not?' Zeno asked. 'How in the world should I know!' she enquired. 'Is not my age set down in the receipt Rustan gave you with me? How should a slave know her own age, sir? And if we knew it, do you think that any of us could speak the truth, except under torture? It would not be worth while to dislocate my arms and burn my feet with hot irons, just to know how old I am, would it? You could not even sell me again, if I had once been tortured!' 'What horrible ideas you have! Imagine torturing this little thing!' Thereupon, without warning, he took her hand in his and looked at it. She made a very slight instinctive movement to withdraw it, and then it lay quite still and passive. 'I am sure I could never bear pain,' she said, smiling. 'I should tell everything at once! I should never make a good conspirator. I suppose you must have been wounded once or twice, when you were young. Tell me, did it hurt very much?' He let her hand fall as he answered, and she drew it back and hid it under her wide sleeve. 'A cut with a sharp sword feels like a stream of icy-cold water,' he answered. 'A thrust through the flesh pricks like a big thorn, and pricks again when the point comes out on the other side. One feels very little, or nothing at all, if one is badly wounded in the head, for one is stunned at once; it is the headache afterwards that really hurts. If one is wounded in the lungs, one feels nothing, but one is choked by the blood, and one must turn on one's face at once in order not to suffocate. Broken bones hurt afterwards as a rule, more than at first, but it is a curious sensation to have one's collar bone smashed by a blow from a two-handed sword----' 'Good heavens!' cried Zoë. 'What a catalogue! How do you know how each thing feels?' 'I can remember,' Zeno answered simply. 'You have been wounded in all those different ways, and you are alive?' Zeno smiled. 'Yes; and you understand now why I look so old.' 'I was not in earnest,' Zoë said. 'You knew that I was not. You need only look at yourself in a mirror to see that I was laughing.' 'I was not very deeply hurt by being taken for a man of fifty,' Zeno answered, not quite truthfully. 'Oh no!' laughed Zoë. 'I cannot imagine that my opinion of your age could make any difference to you. It was silly of me--only, for a man who has had so many adventures, you do look absurdly young!' 'So much the better, since my fighting days are over.' 'And since you are a sober, peace-loving merchant,' said Zoë, continuing the sentence for him. 'But are you so very sure, my lord? Would nothing make you draw your sword again and risk your life on your fencing? Nothing?'