It was all very much the same, but between that time and this there lay all Ercole's life by the Roman shore.
When he had heard, as every one had, how Marcello had been brought to Rome on the tail of a wine-cart, he had been sure that the boy had been laid upon it while the cart was standing before Paoluccio's inn in the night.

He knew the road well, and the ways of the carters, and that they rarely stopped anywhere else between Frascati and Rome.

Again and again he had been on the point of tramping up from the seashore to the place, to see whether he could not find some clue to Marcello's accident there, but something had prevented him, some old dislike of returning to the neighbourhood after such a long absence.

He knew why he had not gone, but he had not confided the reason even to Nino, who was told most things.

He had, moreover, been tolerably sure that nothing short of thumb-screws would extract any information from Paoluccio or his wife, for he knew his own people.