“The stars are coming out,” he said, and looked fleetingly at the sky. They came to a wide, desolate street. A line of arc-lamps seemed to stretch into infinity, but the houses looked empty. They walked on and on. “Say something,” Ruth begged. “Tell me something about yourself. Just this once. Just to-day.” “There’s little good to be told about myself,” he said into the wind. “Whether it’s good or not, I’d like to know it.” “But what?” “Anything.” “I must think. I have a poor memory for my own experiences.” But even as he spoke there emerged the memory of a night which he had thought quite faded. What had happened then seemed menacing now, and seemed in some mysterious way related to Ruth; and the need of confession came upon him like hunger. “Don’t search in your mind,” said Ruth. “Tell what happens to occur to you.” He walked more slowly. Poor in words as he was, he strove first to gather the bare facts in his mind. Ruth smiled and urged him. “Just start. The first word is the hardest.” “Yes, that is true,” he agreed. “Did the thing you’re thinking of happen long ago?” “You are right,” he said. “I am thinking of something definite. You have clear perceptions.” He was surprised. “It’s four years ago. I was motoring with two friends in the south of Italy.” He hesitated. The words were so lame. But the lovely compulsion of Ruth’s glances drew them from their hiding-places, and they gradually came forth more willingly. On a beautiful day of May he and his friends had reached the city of Acquapendente in the Abruzzi. They had really intended to proceed to Viterbo, but the little mountain town pleased his friends, and they persuaded him to stay. He stopped in his story. “I seemed always to want to race from one spot to another,” he said. His friends kept on urging him, but when they stopped in front of the inn, it seemed so dirty that he hated to think of passing the night there. At that moment there came down the steps of the near-by church a girl of such majestic loveliness as he had never seen before; and that vision determined him to stay. The innkeeper, when he was asked who the girl was, pronounced her name full of respect. She was the daughter of a stone-mason named Pratti. Christian bade the innkeeper get ready a supper and invite Angiolina Pratti to it. The innkeeper refused. Thereupon Christian bade him invite the girl’s father, and this the man agreed to do. His friends sought to dissuade Christian, telling him that the women of this land were shy and proud, and that their favours were not easily won. He would, at least, have to go about the business more delicately than he was doing. Christian laughed at them. They reasoned and argued, so that finally he grew stubborn, and declared to them that he would bring about what they held to be quite impossible--that he would accomplish it without artfulness or adroitness or exertion, but simply through his knowledge of the character of these people.