their enormous red and blue striped umbrellas beside their
stalls of fruit, while the people who came to buy moved to and fro
from one to the other, beating down prices, chaffering eagerly with
little cries of "_Per carita!_" and "_Dio mio!_" shrugging their
shoulders, moving away, until at last the peasants would abate their
price by one soldo. A clinking of coppers followed, and the green
peaches and small black figs would be pushed into a string bag with a
bit of meat wrapped in a back number of the _Vedetta Senese_, a half
kilo of _pasta_, and perhaps a tiny packet of snuff from the shop
where they sell salt and tobacco and picture postcards of the Pope and
La Bella Otero.

In the old days the scaffold and the gallows had been set up there,
and the Street of the Dying had earned its name then, so many doomed
wretches had passed down it from the Justice Hall and the prisons to
the place of expiation. Weighed down by chains they had gone
reluctantly, dragging their feet upon their last journey, trying to
listen to the priest's droning of prayers, or to see some friendly
face in the crowd.

The memory of old sorrows and torments lay heavy sometimes here on
those who had eyes to see and ears to hear the things of the past, and
Olive was often pitifully aware of the Moribondi. Rain had streamed
down their haggard faces, washing their tears away, the sun had shone
upon them, dazzling their tired eyes as they turned the corner where
the cobbler had his stall now, and came to the place from whence they
might have their first glimpse of the scaffold. Poor frightened souls!
But Gemma knew nothing of them, and she would have cared nothing if
she had known. She was not imaginative, and her own ills and the
present absorbed her, since now she heard the man's step upon the
stair.

"You have come then," she cried.

He made no answer, but he put his arms about her, holding her close,
and kissed her again and again.

CHAPTER X

"Filippo! Let me go! Let me breathe, _carissimo_! I want to speak to
you."

He did not seem to hear her. He had drawn the long steel pins out of
her hat and had thrown the pretty thing down on the floor, and the
loosened coils of shining hair fell over his hands as his strong lips
bruised the pale, flower-like curves of her mouth.

Filippo had loved many women in the only way possible to him, and they
had been won by his brutality and his insolence, and by the glamour of
his name. The anna