h blessing you. It's heard by this time in heaven, and
it's written. Then I have had two years of madness. If she is right, I
was wrong; I was a devil of hell. I know there's an eye given to dying
creatures, and she looked with it, and she said, the soul of Rinaldo
Guidascarpi, her angel, was glorifying you; and she thanked the sticking
of her heart, when she tried to stab you, poor fool!"

Carlo interrupted: "Now go; you have said enough."

"No, let him speak," said Vittoria. She supposed that Barto was going to
say that he had not given the order for her assassination. "You do not
wish me dead, signore?"

"Nothing that is not standing in my way, signora contessa," said Barto;
and his features blazed with a smile of happy self-justification. "I have
killed a sentinel this night: Providence placed him there. I wish for no
death, but I punish, and--ah! the cursed sight of the woman who calls me
mad for two years. She thrusts a bar of iron in an engine at work, and
says, Work on! work on! Were you not a traitress? Countess Alessandra,
were you not once a traitress? Oh! confess it; save my head. Reflect,
dear lady! it's cruel to make a man of a saintly sincerity look back--I
count the months--seventeen months! to look back seventeen months, and
see that his tongue was a clapper,--his will, his eyes, his ears, all
about him, everything, stirred like a pot on the fire. I traced you. I
saw your treachery. I said--I, I am her Day of Judgement. She shall look
on me and perish, struck down by her own treachery. Were my senses false
to me? I had lived in virtuous fidelity to my principles. None can accuse
me. Why were my senses false, if my principles were true? I said you were
a traitress. I saw it from the first. I had the divine contempt for
women. My distrust of a woman was the eye of this brain, and I
said--Follow her, dog her, find her out! I proved her false; but her
devilish cunning deceived every other man in the world. Oh! let me
bellow, for it's me she proves the mass of corruption! Tomorrow I die,
and if I am mad now, what sort of a curse is that?

"Now to-morrow is an hour--a laugh! But if I've not been shot from a true
bow--if I've been a sham for two years--if my name, and nature, bones,
brains, were all false things hunting a shadow, Countess Alessandra, see
the misery of Barto Rizzo! Look at those two years, and say that I had my
head. Answer me, as you love your husband: are you heart and soul with
him in the