threw down the placard he was carrying and
flung his arms about her.

"Gemma! What is it, for God's sake? Don't sob like that--you that never
cry! Gemma! Gemma, my darling!"

"Nothing, Cesare; I will tell you afterwards--I--can't talk about it
just now."

She hurriedly slipped the tear-stained letter into her pocket; and,
rising, leaned out of the window to hide her face. Martini held his
tongue and bit his moustache. After all these years he had betrayed
himself like a schoolboy--and she had not even noticed it!

"The Cathedral bell is tolling," she said after a little while, looking
round with recovered self-command. "Someone must be dead."

"That is what I came to show you," Martini answered in his everyday
voice. He picked up the placard from the floor and handed it to her.
Hastily printed in large type was a black-bordered announcement that:
"Our dearly beloved Bishop, His Eminence the Cardinal, Monsignor Lorenzo
Montanelli," had died suddenly at Ravenna, "from the rupture of an
aneurism of the heart."

She glanced up quickly from the paper, and Martini answered the unspoken
suggestion in her eyes with a shrug of his shoulders.

"What would you have, Madonna? Aneurism is as good a word as any other."

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