you aught of
him?"

"Walter, Heaven hath demented you!" returned Brettone. "Angelo Villani
is the favourite menial of the Senator."

"Those eyes deceived me, then," muttered Montreal, solemnly and
shuddering; "and, as if her ghost had returned to earth, God smites me
from the grave!"

There was a long silence. At length Montreal, whose bold and sanguine
temper was never long clouded, spoke again.

"Are the Senator's coffers full?--But that is impossible."

"Bare as a Dominican's."

"We are saved, then. He shall name his price for our heads. Money must
be more useful to him than blood."

And as if with that thought all further meditation were rendered
unnecessary, Montreal doffed his mantle, uttered a short prayer, and
flung himself on a pallet in a corner of the cell.

"I have slept on worse beds," said the Knight, stretching himself; and
in a few minutes he was fast asleep.

The brothers listened to his deep-drawn, but regular breathing, with
envy and wonder, but they were in no mood to converse. Still and
speechless, they sate like statues beside the sleeper. Time passed
on, and the first cold air of the hour that succeeds to midnight crept
through the bars of their cell. The bolts crashed, the door opened,
six men-at-arms entered, passed the brothers, and one of them touched
Montreal.

"Ha!" said he, still sleeping, but turning round. "Ha!" said he, in the
soft Provencal tongue, "sweet Adeline, we will not rise yet--it is so
long since we met!"

"What says he?" muttered the guard, shaking Montreal roughly. The Knight
sprang up at once, and his hand grasped the head of his bed as for his
sword. He stared round bewildered, rubbed his eyes, and then gazing on
the guard, became alive to the present.

"Ye are early risers in the Capitol," said he. "What want ye of me?"

"It waits you!"

"It! What?" said Montreal.

"The rack!" replied the soldier, with a malignant scowl.

The Great Captain said not a word. He looked for one moment at the six
swordsmen, as if measuring his single strength against theirs. His eye
then wandered round the room. The rudest bar of iron would have been
dearer to him than he had ever yet found the proofest steel of Milan. He
completed his survey with a sigh, threw his mantle over his shoulders,
nodded at his brethren, and followed the guard.

In a hall of the Capitol, hung with the ominous silk of white rays on a
blood-red ground, sate Rienzi and his councillors. Across a r