sails drifting by, the townsfolk gathering together in
the covered arcades and talking with angry rancour against the dead
woman's lord. He remembered sitting in the hush and gloom of the
judgment-hall and furtively sketching the head of the prisoner because
of its extreme and typical beauty. He remembered how at the time he had
thought this accused lover guiltless, and wondered that the tribunal did
not sooner suspect the miserly, malicious, and subtle meaning of the
husband's face. He remembered listening to the tragic tale that seemed
so well to suit those sombre, feudal streets, those melancholy waters,
seeing the three-edged dagger passed from hand to hand, hearing how the
woman had been found dead in her beauty on her old golden and crimson
bed with the lilies on her breast, and looking at the attitude of the
prisoner--in which the judges saw remorse and guilt, and he could only
see the unutterable horror of a bereaved lover to whom the world was
stripped and naked.

He had stayed but two days in Mantua, but those two days had left an
impression on him like that left by the reading at the fall of night of
some ghastly poem of the middle ages. He had thought that they had
condemned an innocent man, as the judge gave his sentence of the galleys
for life: and the scene had often come back to his thoughts.

The vaulted audience chamber; the strong light pouring in through high
grated windows; the pillars of many-coloured marbles, the frescoed roof;
the country people massed together in the public place, with faces that
were like paintings of Mantegna or Masaccio; the slender supple form of
the accused drooping like a bruised lily between the upright figures of
two carabineers; the judge leaning down over his high desk in black
robes and black square cap, like some Venetian lawgiver of Veronese or
of Titian; and beyond, through an open casement, the silvery, watery,
sun-swept landscape that was still the same as when Romeo came,
banished, to Mantua. All these had remained impressed upon his mind by
the tragedy which there came to its close as a lover, passionate as
Romeo and yet more unfortunate, was condemned to the galleys for his
life. "They have ill judged a guiltless man," he had said to himself as
he had left the court with a sense of pain before injustice done, and
went with heart saddened by a stranger's fate into the misty air, along
the shining water where the Mills of the Twelve Apostles were churning
the