continued Pignaver. 'As soon as
the Benediction is over I will hand it to you, and I hope you will find
it convenient to start at once.'

'We are ready,' Gambardella replied. 'To-morrow night we shall be in
Ferrara, and if your friends are still there, we may be here again on
the third day.'

'Heaven grant us all its favours and a speedy return!' prayed Trombin.

'Amen,' said the Senator, calculating that if only three days were
consumed, the Bravi would have ninety-four ducats in hand, and he would
have to pay them only four hundred and six.

In his pocket his hand grasped the heavy little bag containing the gold,
and he wished that private vengeance and justice were not so dear; but
he was not a miser, though he had a real Venetian's understanding of the
value of money, and did not like to part with it till he was sure that
he was to receive a full equivalent. For the rest, what he was doing was
perfectly justifiable in his eyes: if the couple had been caught within
the territory of the Republic, Alessandro Stradella would have had to
answer to the law for the atrocious crime of carrying off a Senator's
niece and affianced bride who was a minor, and the law would not have
been tender to the Sicilian; the least penalty he would have suffered
would have been to be chained to an oar on a government galley, and it
was quite possible that he might have been hanged. Most people would
prefer to be run through with a rapier, and it was therefore clear that
Stradella ought to be satisfied. As for such weakness as a qualm of
conscience, Pignaver was as far above such childishness as the Bravi
themselves.

He gave them the little bag of ducats and took leave of them by the
monument of Pietro Bernardini, almost on the spot where Ortensia and
Pina had put on their brown cloaks three or four days earlier.

When he was gone, Trombin and Gambardella looked at each other in
silence; the dark man's thin lips, visible on each side of the point of
his nose, but quite shaded by it in the middle, were smiling faintly,
but Trombin's cherubic countenance expressed, or caricatured, the utter
beatitude of one of those painted angels to which his friend always
compared him.

They walked slowly up the church towards the sacristy, and at the door
they met the sacristan, a lay brother, coming out with his long
extinguisher in his hand. They stopped him politely.

'We desire to offer two candles to Saint Francis,' said Gambardella,
'one