em to take
her.

Caponsacchi insisted that _he_ should lead them to the room where she
was sleeping. He was a priest and privileged; when they came there, if
the officer should detect

"Guilt on her face when it meets mine, then judge
Between us and the mad dog howling there!"

They all went up together. There she lay,

"O' the couch, still breathless, motionless, sleep's self,
Wax-white, seraphic, saturate with the sun
That filled the window with a light like blood."

At Guido's loud order to the officers, she started up, and stood erect,
face to face with the husband: "the opprobrious blur against all peace
and joy and light and life"--for he was standing against the window
a-flame with morning. But in her terror, that seemed to her the flame
from hell, since _he_ was in it--and she cried to him to stand away, she
chose hell rather than "embracing any more."

Caponsacchi tried to go to her, but now the room was full of the rabble
pouring in at the noise--he was caught--"they heaped themselves upon
me." . . . Then, when she saw "my angel helplessly held back," then

"Came all the strength back in a sudden swell,"

--and she sprang at her husband, seized the sword that hung beside him,

"Drew, brandished it, the sunrise burned for joy
O' the blade. 'Die,' cried she, 'devil, in God's name!'
Ah, but they all closed round her, twelve to one
. . . Dead-white and disarmed she lay."

She said, dying, that this, her first and last resistance, had been
invincible, for she had struck at the lie in Guido; and thus not "the
vain sword nor weak speech" had saved her, but Caponsacchi's truth:--

"You see, I will not have the service fail!
I say the angel saved me: I am safe! . . .
What o' the way to the end?--the end crowns all"

--for even though she now was dying, there had been the time at the
convent with the quiet nuns, and then the safety with her parents, and
then:

"My babe was given me! Yes, he saved my babe:
It would not have peeped forth, the bird-like thing,
Through that Arezzo noise and trouble . . .
But the sweet peace cured all, and let me live
And give my bird the life among the leaves
God meant him! Weeks and months of quietude,
I could lie in such peace and learn so much,
Know life a little, I should leave so soon.
Therefore, because this man restored my soul
All has been