her alone, bowed and covered as she sat.
When he had prayed, he went away, with reverently bent head, and she
heard that he trod softly. In two hours he came back, knelt again, and
again repeated Latin words. She knew that he was doing it for a show of
sorrow, and she wished to kill him. Then, when he was softly gone again,
she wondered how soon she herself was to die. There were two servants in
the room, behind her, keeping watch. They were relieved by two others,
changing through the night. She heard them come and go, but did not turn
her head.

When the dawn forelightened, like the ghost of a buried day risen from
the grave to see its past deeds, she was not yet dead. She had once read
how the murderers of Vittoria Accoramboni had been torn with red-hot
pincers and otherwise grievously tortured, and how knives had been
thrust deep into their breasts just where the heart was not, but near
it, and how they had died hard, for they had lived more than half an
hour with the knives in them, and at the last had been quartered alive.
She had not believed what she had read, but now she knew that it was
true. She envied them the searing, the tearing, and the knives which had
at last killed them, though they had died so hard.

The wan dawn turned the dead man's face from waxen yellow to stone grey.
The servants saw it, whispered, and closed the inner shutters, and the
yellow candle-light shone again in the room. Any light is better than
daylight on a dead face.

Matilde sat still, bowed and covered. Fixed in the world of grief, the
hours of sorrow passed her by. There was neither night nor day in the
dead watch of the closed room, under the tall candles, burning steadily.

Then, at last, other feet were on the threshold, stumbling, shuffling,
ill-shod feet of men bearing a burden. In that city, one may not lie in
his home more than one day after he is dead. They set down what they
bore, beside the couch, and waited, and the woman saw their questioning
faces and heard them whispering. Then one of them, with some reverence
and gentleness, thrust his arm under the low pillow, and with his eyes
bade another lift the feet. But Matilde rose then and came between them
and the dead. They thought that she would look at him once more, and
they drew back, while she looked, for she bent over his face. But the
shawl about her head fell about her, and they could not see that she
kissed him. They waited.

The great woman put her hands ab