"But is it true ?" I added.
He shrugged his shoulders.

"Rumour's habit is to lie," he answered.
"Yet for such a lie as that, so monstrous an imagination would be needed that, rather, am I inclined to account it truth.

There are no more poets in Pesaro since you left.

But at what hour was it that you quitted the city ?" To hesitate again were to betray myself; it were to suggest that I was seeking an answer that should sort well with the rest of my story.
Besides, what could the hour signify?
"It would be about the first hour of night," I said.

He looked at me with increasing strangeness.
"You must indeed have wandered from your road to have got no farther than this in all that time.