not guilty, she answered guilty. The court, however,
requested her to reconsider her plea, assigned her an advocate, and went
through all the formalities of an ordinary case. A principal object of
the prosecution had been to discover accomplices, but the prisoner
continued to protest that she had none. She neither denied nor
extenuated the crime, and she acknowledged it to have been premeditated.
When asked to state her motive, she said it was hatred of the methods
adopted by the dead man to wipe out political opponents, and a
determination to send to the bar of the Almighty one who had placed
himself above human law.

The Pope sent his Noble Guard to the next day's hearing of the trial,
and when the Count de Raymond came back his eyes were red and swollen.
The beautiful and melancholy face of the young prisoner sitting behind
iron bars that were like the cage of a wild beast had made a pitiful
impression. Her calmness, her total self-abandonment, the sublime
feelings that even in the presence of a charge of murder expressed
themselves in her sweet voice, had moved everybody to tears. Then the
prosecution had been so debasing in its questions about her visits to
the Vatican and in its efforts to implicate David Rossi by means of a
letter addressed to the prison at Milan.

"But _I_ did it," the young prisoner had said again and again with
steadfast fervour, only deepening to alarm when evidence concerning the
revolver seemed to endanger the absent man.

There had been some conflicting medical evidence as to whether the death
could have been due to a pistol-shot, and certain astounding disclosures
of police corruption and prison tyranny. A judge of the Military
Tribunal had given startling proof of the Prime Minister's complicity in
an infamous case, ending with the suicide of the prisoner's man-servant
in open court, and an old Garibaldian among the people, packed away
beyond the barrier, had cried out:

"He was just a black-dyed villain, and God Almighty save us from such
another."

This laying bare of the machinery of statecraft had made a great
sensation, and even the judge on the bench, being a just man, had
lowered his eyes before the accused at the bar. As the prisoner was
taken back to prison past the Castle of St. Angelo and the Military
College, the crowds had cheered her again and again, and sitting in an
open car with a Carabineer by her side, she had looked frightened at
finding herself a heroine where