If, as we suspected, he already had a considerable
body of adherents on shore, he could land and reconnoiter without very
great danger of falling into the colonel's hands. Finally, even if
he didn't come, we hoped the letter would be enough to divert his
attention from any thought of fugitive boats and runaway lovers. I
could have made the terms of it even more alluring, but the signorina,
with that extraordinarily distorted morality distinctive of her sex,
refused to swear to anything literally untrue in a letter which was
itself from beginning to end a monumental falsehood; though not a
student of ethics, she was keenly alive to the distinction between
the _expressio falsi_ and the _suppressio veri_. The only passage she
doubted about was the last, "If you come back to me." "But then he
won't come back _to me_ if I'm not there!" she exclaimed triumphantly.
What happened to him after he landed--whether he cooked the colonel's
goose or the colonel cooked his--I really could not afford to
consider. As a matter of personal preference, I should have liked the
former, but I did not allow any such considerations to influence my
conduct.
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