her for a moment, and then he called on his men to search
the rooms.

"What's this?" said the marshal, taking up a sealed letter from the
bureau and reading the superscription: "L'on, Davide Rossi, Carceri
Giudiziarie, di Milano."

"That's a letter I wrote to my husband and haven't yet posted," said
Roma.

"But what's this?" cried a voice from the dining-room. "Presented to the
Honourable David Rossi by the Italian colony in Zuerich."

Roma sank into a seat. It was the revolver. She had forgotten it.

"That's all right," said the marshal, with the same chuckle as before.

Dizzy and almost blind in her terror, Roma struggled to her feet. "The
revolver belongs to me," she said. "Mr. Rossi left it in my keeping
when he went away two months ago, and since that time he has never
touched it."

"Then who fired the shot that killed his Excellency, Signora?"

"_I_ did," said Roma.

Instinctively the man removed his hat.

Within half-an-hour Roma had repeated her statement at the Regina
C[oe]li, and the Carabineers, to prevent a public scandal, had smuggled
the body of the Baron, under the cover of night, to his office in the
Palazzo Braschi, on the opposite side of the piazza.

X

One thought was supreme in David Rossi's mind when he left the Piazza
Navona--that the world in which he had lived was shaken to its
foundations and his life was at an end. The unhappy man wandered about
the streets without asking himself where he was going or what was to
become of him.

Many feelings tore his heart, but the worst of them was anger. He had
taken the life of the Baron. The man deserved his death, and he felt no
pity for his victim and no remorse for his crime. But that he should
have killed the Minister, he who had twice stood between him and death,
he who had resisted the doctrine of violence and all his life preached
the gospel of peace, this was a degradation too shameful and abject.

The woman had been the beginning and end of everything. "How I hate
her!" he thought. He was telling himself for the hundredth time that he
had never hated anybody so much before, when he became aware that he had
returned to the neighbourhood of the Piazza Navona. Without knowing what
he was doing, he had been walking round and round it.

He began to picture Roma as he had seen her that night. The beautiful,
mournful, pleading face, which he had not really seen while his eyes
looked on it, now rose be