. He was lying in bed with his hands clasped
behind his head. His sallow face, worn by a sleepless night, and perhaps
by a wounding memory, was turned towards the light, and the new day
dealt harshly with it. There were heavy lines under the eyes. The eyes
looked steadily in front of him, plunged deep in a past which had
something of the irrevocable tenderness of the dawn in it, the holy
reflection of an inalienable love.

He did not stir as his wife came in. His eyes only moved, resting upon
her for a moment, focussing her with difficulty, as if withdrawn from
something at a great distance, and then they turned once more to the
window.

A pale primrose light had risen above the blue tangled mist of ilexes
and olives. The cypresses stood half-veiled in mist, half-sharply clear
against the stainless pallor of the upper sky.

"I am so miserable, Andrea."

He did not speak.

"I cannot sleep."

Still no answer.

"I am convinced that Michael is innocent."

"It goes without saying."

"Then they can't convict him, can they?"

"They will convict him," said the duke, and for a moment he bent his
eyes upon her. "Has he not accused himself?"

"They won't--hang him?"

The duke shrugged his shoulders. He did not think fit to enlighten his
wife's ignorance of the fact that in Italy there is no capital
punishment.

"But if he has not done it, and we know he has not," faltered Fay.

"He is perhaps shielding someone," said the duke, "the real murderer."

"I don't see how that could be."

"He may have his reasons. The real murderer is perhaps a friend--or
a--woman. Your cousin is a romantic. It is always better for a romantic
if he had not been born. But generally a female millstone is in
readiness to tie itself round him, and cast him into the sea. The world
is not fitted to him. It is to egotistic persons like you and me, my
Francesca, to whom the world is most admirably adapted."

"I don't see how the murderer could be a woman. Women don't murder men
on the high road."

"No, not on the high road. You are in the right. How dusty, how dirty is
the high road! But I have known, not once nor twice, women to murder men
very quietly. Oh! so gently and cleanly--to let them die. I am much
older than you, but you will perhaps also live to see a woman do this,
Francesca. And now retire to your room, and let me counsel you to take
some rest. Your beauty needs it."

She burst into tears.

"How little you care!" she said