the door. "Go, and make quick work."

CHAPTER SIXTY SEVEN.

WAITING BY THE RIVER.

About the time when the two Compagnacci went on their errand, there was
another man who, on the opposite side of the Arno, was also going out
into the chill grey twilight. His errand, apparently, could have no
relation to theirs; he was making his way to the brink of the river at a
spot which, though within the city walls, was overlooked by no
dwellings, and which only seemed the more shrouded and lonely for the
warehouses and granaries which at some little distance backward turned
their shoulders to the river. There was a sloping width of long grass
and rushes made all the more dank by broad gutters which here and there
emptied themselves into the Arno.

The gutters and the loneliness were the attraction that drew this man to
come and sit down among the grass, and bend over the waters that ran
swiftly in the channelled slope at his side. For he had once had a
large piece of bread brought to him by one of those friendly runlets,
and more than once a raw carrot and apple-parings. It was worth while
to wait for such chances in a place where there was no one to see, and
often in his restless wakefulness he came to watch here before daybreak;
it might save him for one day the need of that silent begging which
consisted in sitting on a church-step by the wayside out beyond the
Porta San Frediano.

For Baldassarre hated begging so much that he would perhaps have chosen
to die rather than make even that silent appeal, but for one reason that
made him desire to live. It was no longer a hope; it was only that
possibility which clings to every idea that has taken complete
possession of the mind: the sort of possibility that makes a woman watch
on a headland for the ship which held something dear, though all her
neighbours are certain that the ship was a wreck long years ago. After
he had come out of the convent hospital, where the monks of San Miniato
had taken care of him as long as he was helpless; after he had watched
in vain for the Wife who was to help him, and had begun to think that
she was dead of the pestilence that seemed to fill all the space since
the night he parted from her, he had been unable to conceive any way in
which sacred vengeance could satisfy itself through his arm. His knife
was gone, and he was too feeble in body to win another by work, too
feeble in mind, even if he had had the knife, to contrive that it