great dam into froth, as they had done through seven centuries,
since first, with reverent care, the builder had set the sacred statues
there that they might bless the grinding of the corn.

Sitting now in the silence of the tomb, Sanctis recalled that day, when,
towards the setting of the sun, he had strolled there by the
water-wheels of the twelve disciples, and allowed the fate of an unknown
man, declared a criminal by impartial judges, to cloud over for him the
radiance of evening on the willowy Serraglio and chase away his peaceful
thoughts of Virgil. He remembered how the country people had come out by
the bridge and glided away in their boats, and talked of the murder of
Donna Aloysia; and how they had, one and all of them, said, going back
over the lake water or along the reed-fringed roads, to their
farmhouses, that there could be no manner of doubt about it--the lover
had been moon-struck and mad with jealousy, and his dagger had found
its way to her breast. They had not blamed him much, but they had never
doubted his guilt; and the foreigner alone, standing by the mill
gateway, and seeing the golden sun go down beyond the furthermost fields
of reeds that grew blood-red as the waters grew, had thought to himself
and said half aloud:

"Poor Romeo! he is guiltless, even though the dagger were his"----

And a prior, black-robed, with broad looped-up black hat, who was also
watching the sunset, breviary in hand, had smiled and said, "Nay, Romeo,
banished to us, had no blood on his hand; but this Romeo, native of our
city, has. Mantua will be not ill rid of Luitbrand d'Este."

Then he again, in obstinacy and against all the priest's better
knowledge as a Mantuan, had insisted and said, "The man is innocent."

And the sun had gone down as he had spoken, and the priest had smiled--a
smile cold as a dagger's blade--perhaps recalling sins confessed to him
of love that had changed to hate, of fierce delight ending in as fierce
a death-blow. Mantua in her day had seen so much alike of love and hate.

"The man is innocent," he had said insisting, whilst the carmine light
had glowed on the lagoons and bridges, and on the Lombard walls, and
Gothic gables, and high bell-towers, and ducal palaces, and feudal
fortresses of the city in whose street Crichton fell to the hired steel
of bravoes.

* * *

She had the heaven-born faculty of observation of the poets, and she had
that instinct of delight in n