is knuckles against the round throat, and knelt upon
the chest with all the force of his aged frame. Let death come now!

Again he kept his watch on the face. And when the eyes were rigid
again, he dared not trust them. He would never lose his hold till some
one came and found them. Justice would send some witness, and then he,
Baldassarre, would declare that he had killed this traitor, to whom he
had once been a father. They would perhaps believe him now, and then he
would be content with the struggle of justice on earth--then he would
desire to die with his hold on this body, and follow the traitor to hell
that he might clutch him there.

And so he knelt, and so he pressed his knuckles against the round
throat, without trusting to the seeming death, till the light got strong
and he could kneel no longer. Then he sat on the body, still clutching
the neck of the tunic. But the hours went on, and no witness came. No
eyes descried afar off the two human bodies among the tall grass by the
riverside. Florence was busy with greater affairs, and the preparation
of a deeper tragedy.

Not long after those two bodies were lying in the grass, Savonarola was
being tortured, and crying out in his agony, "I will confess!"

It was not until the sun was westward that a waggon drawn by a mild grey
ox came to the edge of the grassy margin, and as the man who led it was
leaning to gather up the round stones that lay heaped in readiness to be
carried away, he detected some startling object in the grass. The aged
man had fallen forward, and his dead clutch was on the garment of the
other. It was not possible to separate them: nay, it was better to put
them into the waggon and carry them as they were into the great Piazza,
that notice might be given to the Eight.

As the waggon entered the frequented streets there was a growing crowd
escorting it with its strange burden. No one knew the bodies for a long
while, for the aged face had fallen forward, half hiding the younger.
But before they had been moved out of sight, they had been recognised.

"I know that old man," Piero di Cosimo had testified. "I painted his
likeness once. He is the prisoner who clutched Melema on the steps of
the Duomo."

"He is perhaps the same old man who appeared at supper in my gardens,"
said Bernardo Rucellai, one of the Eight. "I had forgotten him. I
thought he had died in prison. But there is no knowing the truth now."

Who shall put his