otographing machines, and their bicycles, and the
souls of their dead! If you do not believe me, you can see the place
where they say that he lay! I tell you there is not room for a cat in
this house. Believe me if you like!"

"How can I not believe such a respectable person as you seem to be?"
inquired Ercole gravely.

"I thank you. And since it happens that you are in the service of the
young gentleman himself, I hope you will tell him that if he fancies he
was in my house, he is mistaken."

"Surely," said Ercole.

"Besides," exclaimed Paoluccio, "how could he know where he was? Are not
all inns on these roads alike? He was in another, that is all. And what
had I to do with that?"

"Nothing," assented Ercole. "I thank you for your conversation. I will
take a glass of the aniseed before I go, if you please."

"Are you going already?" asked Paoluccio, as he went to fetch the bottle
and the little cast glass from which he himself had drunk.

"Yes," Ercole answered. "I go to Rome. I stopped to refresh myself."

"It will be hot on the road," said Paoluccio, setting the full glass
down on the table. "Two sous," he added, as Ercole produced his old
sheepskin purse. "Thank you."

"Thank you," Ercole answered, and tipped the spirits down his throat.
"Yes, it will be hot, but what can one do? We are used to it, my dog and
I. We are not of wax to melt in the sun."

"It is true that this dog does not look as if he were wax," Paoluccio
remarked, for the qualities of Nino had not escaped him.

"No. He is not of wax. He is of sugar, all sugar! He has a very sweet
nature."

"One would not say so," answered Paoluccio doubtfully. "If you go to the
city you must muzzle him, or they will make you pay a fine. Otherwise
they will kill him for you."

"Do you think any one would try to catch him if I let him run loose?"
asked Ercole, as if in doubt. "He killed a full-grown wolf before he was
two years old, and not long ago he worried a sheepdog of the Campagna as
if it had been nothing but a lamb. Do you think any one would try to
catch him?"

"If it fell to me, I should go to confession first," said Paoluccio.

So Ercole left the inn and trudged along the road to Rome with Nino at
his heels, without once looking behind him; past the Baldinotti houses
and into the Via Appia Nuova, and on into the city through the gate of
San Giovanni, where the octroi men stopped him and made him show them
what he had in his canvas bag. Wh