making; and his patron
was already displeased. These things were what he was there to do, and
he was going to church instead! "Are you turning Molinist?" the patron
asked. "I answered quick" (says Caponsacchi in his narrative)

"Sir, what if I turned Christian?"

--and at once announced his resolve to go to Rome as soon as Lent was
over. One evening, before he went, he was sitting thinking how his life
"had shaken under him"; and

"Thinking moreover . . . oh, thinking, if you like,
How utterly dissociated was I
A priest and celibate, from the sad strange wife
Of Guido . . .
. . . I had a whole store of strengths
Eating into my heart, which craved employ,
And she, perhaps, need of a finger's help--
And yet there was no way in the wide world
To stretch out mine."

Her smile kept glowing out of the devotional book he was trying to read,
and he sat thus--when suddenly there came a tap at the door, and on his
summons, there glided in "a masked muffled mystery," who laid a letter
on the open book, and stood back demurely waiting.

It was Margherita, the "kind of maid" of Count Guido, and the letter
purported to be from Pompilia, offering her love. Caponsacchi saw
through the trick at once: the letter was written by Guido. He answered
it in such a way that it would save _her_ from all anger, and at the
same time infuriate the "jealous miscreant" who had written it:

". . . What made you--may one ask?--
Marry your hideous husband?"

But henceforth such letters came thick and fast. Caponsacchi was met in
the street, signed to in church; slips were found in his prayer-book,
they dropped from the window if he passed. . . . At length there arrived
a note in a different manner. This warned him _not_ to come, to avoid
the window for his life. At once he answered that the street was
free--he should go to the window if he chose, and he would go that
evening at the Ave. His conviction was that he should find the husband
there, not the wife--for though he had seen through the trick, it did
not occur to him that it was more than a device of jealousy to trap
them, already suspected after that mutual gaze at the theatre. What it
really was, he never guessed at all.

Meanwhile--turning now to Pompilia's dying speech to the nuns who nursed
her--the companion persecution had been going on at the castle. Day
after day, Margherita had dinned the name of