and help him with
his bandage. But no one answered, call as he would. So at last he
tottered down the stairs and entered her room. There in a corner he saw
the poor creature lying huddled up, bound hand and foot, and with a gag
in her mouth. When he had unloosed her she fell half dead at his feet,
and only recovered when he had sprinkled her well with water, and
poured a little wine down her throat, and then crying and laughing, she
began to kiss his hands and his coat. But there was no getting a single
rational word from her; her fright when Il Rosso surprised her, and
then her agony when she heard her master return and go up the steps at
the top of which his enemy was awaiting him--these upset her poor mind
completely, and during the remainder of her life, the years followed
each other without her being conscious of any alternation except of
heat and cold, hunger and repletion.

"I took the captain to my house, and nursed him for a week until his
wound had pretty well healed. The sortie against the banditti had to
take place of course without him, but nothing more decisive was
effected than the procuring us peace for about a couple of years. The
only prisoner taken was a small boy whose father was one of the
bandits, and who himself had sometimes joined them. Nothing could be
made of him, so he was let go again. However one fact he did have to
tell us: on the morning after the night in which Il Rosso had that
reckoning with his enemy, a quarrel arose, and some of the party
accused Domenico of being a traitor. At last knives were drawn, and
before the cooler-headed could interfere, Domenico lay dead on the bare
rock, the knife in his breast, almost on the very spot where he had met
Erminia.

"As for Signor Gustavo he went to Naples, and thence sailed to Greece.
Later I heard from an artist that he had been drowned there, swimming
in the open sea. Possibly the wound in the leg was imperfectly healed,
or it may have left some weakness behind it, for once he could, as he
told me, have swum a match against that great Lord himself. But as to
what became of the picture of Erminia, which the artist well remembered
to have seen, I could learn nothing. I would gladly have given half my
substance if only I could have got possession of it.

"And now, _amico mio_, you know the history of Barbarossa and Erminia."

END OF BARBAROSSA.

THE