down here in the hollow of my unhurt arm."

"No ... no!" she had cried. "Together." No other man should touch
her--if she died it must be in his arms. How still she was, how little
warmth of life was there to cherish, how small a fluttering of the
dear heart under his hand's pressure....

"Go now and get help."

Vincenzo made no answer, but his eyes were like those of a faithful
dog, anguished, appealing, and he knelt to kiss the poor fingers that
had been bruised under that cruel heel before he went out of the room.

Very softly he closed and locked the door, and then stood for a while
in the close darkness of the passage, listening. That devil--he wanted
them to die--suppose he should be lurking somewhere about the house,
waiting for the servant to go that he might finish his work.

The Tor di Rocca were hard and swift and cruel as steel. That Duchess
Veronica, who had brought her husband the other woman's severed head,
wrapped in fine linen of her own weaving, as a New Year's gift!--she
had been one of them. Then there had lived one Filippo who kept his
younger brother chained up to the wall of some inner room of his
Florentine palace for seventeen years, until, at last, a serving-man
dared to go and tell of the sound of blows in the night hours, the
moaning, the clank of a chain, and the people broke in, and hanged the
Prince from the wrought-iron _fanale_ outside his own gate.

Vincenzo knew of all these old, past horrors; the Florentines had
made ballads of them, and sang them in the streets, and one might buy
"_L'Assassina_," or "_Il Fratello del Principe_," printed on little
sheets of coarse paper, on the stalls in the Mercato, for one soldo.
So, though the house was very still, the little man drew his long
knife and read the motto scratched on the blade before he climbed the
stairs.

"_Non ti fidar a me se il cor ti manca._"

Hurriedly he passed through every room, but there was no one there,
and so he ran out into the dripping green wilderness of torn leaves
and storm-tossed, drenched blossoms, and up the lane, between the high
walls of the olive orchards, to the town.

Don Filippo was really gone, and he was waiting now on the platform of
the Albano station for the train that should take him back to Rome. He
was not, however, presenting the spectacle of the murderer fleeing
from his crime. He was quite calm. The heat and cruelty of the Tor di
Rocca blood flared in him, but it burned with no steady f