and over again, she felt his breathing grow more
faint and irregular. At length it seemed to stop, and thinking it was
gone altogether, she made the sign of the cross and said:

"We commend to Thee, O Lord, the soul of Thy servant Gabriel, that being
dead to the world he may live to Thee, and those sins which through the
frailty of human life he has committed, Thou by the indulgence of Thy
most merciful loving-kindness may wipe out, through Christ our Lord.
Amen."

Then the glazed eyes opened wide and lighted up with a pitiful smile.

"I'm dying in your arms, Roma."

Then a long breath, and then:

"Adieu!"

He had tried to subdue all men to his will, and there was one man he had
subdued above all others--himself. There is a greater man than the great
man--the man who is too great to be great.

IX

There had been no light in the dining-room except the reflection from
the lamp in the sitting-room, and now it fell with awful shadows on the
whitening face turned upward on the couch. The pains of death had given
a distorted expression, and the eyes remained open. Roma wished to close
them, but dared not try, and the image of inanimate objects standing in
the light was mirrored in their dull and glassy surface. The dog in the
distance was still barking, and a company of tipsy revellers were
passing through the piazza singing a drinking song with a laugh in it.
When they were gone the clocks outside began to strike. It was one
o'clock, and the hour seemed to dance over the city in single steps.

Roma's terror became unbearable. Feeling herself to be a murderer, she
acted on a murderer's impulse and prepared to fly. When she recalled the
emotions with which she had determined to kill the Baron and then
deliver herself up to justice, they seemed so remote that they might
have existed only in a dream or belonged to another existence.

Trembling from head to foot, and scarcely able to support herself, she
fixed her hat and veil afresh, put on her coat, and, taking one last
fearful look at the wide-open eyes on the couch, she went backwards to
the door. She dared not turn round from a creeping fear that something
might touch her on the shoulder.

The door was open. No doubt Rossi had left it so, and she had not
noticed the circumstance until now. She had got as far as the first
landing when a poignant memory came to her--the memory of how she had
first descended those stairs with Rossi