fore the eye of his mind. This caused a wave of
tenderness to pass over him against his will, and his heart, so full of
hatred, began to melt with love.

All the cruel words he had spoken at parting returned to his memory, and
he told himself that he had been too hasty. Instead of bearing her down
he should have listened to her explanation. Before the Baron entered
the room she had been at the point of swearing that her love, and
nothing but her love, had caused her to betray him.

He told himself she had lied, but the thought was hell, and to escape
from it he made for the bank of the river again. This time he crossed
the bridge of St. Angelo, and passed up the Borgo to the piazza of St.
Peter's. But the piazza itself awakened a crowd of memories. It was
there in a balcony that he had first seen Roma, not plainly, but vaguely
in a summer cloud of lace and sunshades.

Then it occurred to him that it must have been on this spot that Roma
was inspired with the plot which had ended with his betrayal. At that
thought all the bitterness of his soul returned. He told himself she
deserved every word he had said to her, and blamed himself for the
humiliation he had gone through in his attempt to make excuses for what
she had done. To the curse he had hurled at her at the last moment he
added words of fiercer anger, and though they were spoken only in his
brain, or to the dark night and the rolling river, they intensified his
fury.

"Oh, how I hate her!" he thought.

The _piazza_, was quiet. There was a light in the Pope's windows, and a
Swiss Guard was patrolling behind the open wicket of the bronze gate to
the Vatican. A porter in gorgeous livery was yawning by the door of the
Prime Minister's palace. The man was waiting for his master. He would
_have_ to wait.

The clock of St. Peter's struck one, and the silent place began to be
peopled with many shadows. The scene of the Pope's jubilee returned to
Rossi's mind. He saw and heard everything over again. The crowd, the
gorgeous procession, the Pope, and last of all his own speech. A
sardonic smile crossed his face in the darkness as he thought of what he
had said.

"Is it possible that I can ever have believed those fables?"

He was tramping down the Trastevere, picturing his trial for the murder
of the Baron, with Roma in the witness-box and himself in the dock. The
cold horror of it all was insupportable, and he told himself that there
was only one place in which he