other men were waiting,
and where was gathered the entire family of the castle--a gaping, rather
frightened little crowd.

They brought forth a mule for me, and I mounted. Then suddenly there was
Fra Gervasio at my side again.

"I, too, am going hence," he said. "Be of good courage, Agostino. There
is no effort I will not make on your behalf." In a broken voice he added
his farewells ere he stood back at the captain's peremptory bidding. The
little troop closed round me, and thus, within a couple of hours of my
coming, I departed again from Mondolfo, surrendered to the hangman
by the pious hands of my mother, who on her knees, no doubt, would be
thanking God for having afforded her the grace to act in so righteous a
manner.

Once only did my cousin address me, and that was soon after we had left
the town behind us. He motioned the men away, and rode to my side. Then
he looked at me with mocking, hating eyes.

"You had done better to have continued in your saint's trade than have
become so very magnificent a sinner," said he.

I did not answer him, and he rode on beside me in silence some little
way.

"Ah, well," he sighed at last. "Your course has been a brief one, but
very eventful. And who would have suspected so very fierce a wolf under
so sheepish an outside? Body of God! You fooled us all, you and that
white-faced trull."

He said it through his teeth with such a concentration of rage in his
tones that it was easy to guess where the sore rankled.

I looked at him gravely. "Does it become you, sir, do you think, to gird
at one who is your prisoner?"

"And did you not gird at me when it was your turn?" he flashed back
fiercely. "Did not you and she laugh together over that poor, fond fool
Cosimo whose money she took so very freely, and yet who seems to have
been the only one excluded from her favours?"

"You lie, you dog!" I blazed at him, so fiercely that the men turned in
their saddles. He paled, and half raised the gauntleted hand in which he
carried his whip. But he controlled himself, and barked an order to his
followers:

"Ride on, there!"

When they had drawn off a little, and we were alone again, "I do not
lie, sir," he said. "It is a practice which I leave to shavelings of all
degrees."

"If you say that she took aught from you, then you lie," I repeated.

He considered me steadily. "Fool!" he said at last. "Whence else
came her jewels and fine clothes? From Fifanti, do you think--that
im