ut only that you cannot tell me. Up with him, Martino."

In a last pitiable struggle against the inevitable, the fool broke from
his guards, and flung himself towards the door. One of the burly Swiss
caught him by the neck in a grip that made him cry out with pain. Gian
Maria eyed him with a sinister smile, and Martin proceeded to fasten one
end of the rope to his pinioned wrists. Then they led him, shivering
to the great bed. The other end of the cord was passed over one of
the bared arms of the canopy-frame. This end was grasped by the two
men-at-arms. Martin stood beside the prisoner. The Duke flung himself
into a great carved chair, an air of relish now investing his round,
pale face.

"You know what is about to befall you," he said, in tones of chilling
indifference. "Will you speak before we begin?"

"My lord," said the fool, in a voice that terror was throttling, "you
are a good Christian, a loyal son of Mother Church, and a believer in
the eternal fires of hell?"

A frown settled on Gian Maria's brow. Was the fool about to intimidate
him with talk of supernatural vengeance?

"Thus," Peppe continued, "you will perhaps be merciful when I confess
my position. I made most solemn oath to the man I met at Acquasparta on
that luckless day, that I would never reveal his identity. What am I to
do? If I keep my oath, you will torture me to death perhaps. If I break
it, I shall be damned eternally. Have mercy, noble lord, since now you
know how I am placed."

The smile broadened on Gian Maria's face, and the cruelty of his mouth
and eyes seemed intensified by it. The fool had told him that which he
would have given much to learn. He had told him that this man whose
name he sought, had so feared that his presence that day at Acquasparta
should become known, that he had bound the fool by oath not to divulge
the secret of it. Of what he had before suspected he was now assured.
The man in question was one of the conspirators; probably the very
chief of them. Nothing short of the fool's death under torture would now
restrain him from learning the name of that unknown who had done him
the double injury of conspiring against him, and--if the fool were to be
believed--of capturing the heart of Valentina.

"For the damnation of your soul I shall not be called to answer," he
said at last. "Care enough have I to save my own--for temptations are
many and this poor flesh is weak. But it is this man's name I need,
and--by the fi