tly turned the conversation, though he became more bitter, as if
his life was now even more soured than formerly. Then, at midnight, he
took his hat and stick, and I opened the gate of the drive and let him
out upon the road.

As he left, he grasped my hand warmly, and in a voice full of emotion
said--

"Good-night, Ewart. May you be rewarded one day for keeping from
starvation a good-for-nothing devil like myself!"

And he passed on into the darkness beneath the trees, on his way back to
his high-up humble room down in the heart of the town.

At eight o'clock next morning, when I met Pietro, Bindo's man, I noticed
an unusual expression upon his face, and asked him what had happened.

"I have bad news for you, Signor Ewart," he answered with hesitation.
"At four o'clock this morning the Signor Whitaker was found by the
police lying upon the pavement of the Lung Arno, close to the Porta San
Frediano. He was dead--struck down with a knife from behind."

"Murdered!" I gasped.

"Yes, Signore. It is already in the papers;" and he handed me a copy of
the _Nazione_.

Dumbfounded, unnerved, I dressed myself quickly, and driving down to the
police-office, saw the head of the detective department, a man named
Bianchi.

The sharp-featured little man sitting at the table, after taking down
a summary of all I knew regarding my poor friend, explained how the
discovery had been made. The body was quite cold when found, and the
deep wound between the shoulders showed most conclusively that he had
fallen by the hand of an assassin. I was then shown the body, and looked
upon the face of poor Charlie, the "outsider," for the last time.

"He had no money upon him," I told Bianchi. "Indeed, before leaving me
he had remarked that he was almost without a soldo."

"Yes. It is that very fact which puzzles us. The motive of the crime was
evidently not robbery."

In the days that succeeded the police made most searching inquiries, but
discovered nothing. My only regret--and it was indeed a deep one--was
that I had lost the letter he had given me with injunctions to open it
after his death. Did he fear assassination? I wondered. Did that letter
give any clue to the assassin?

But the precious document, whatever it might be, was now irretrievably
lost, and the death of "Mr. Charles Whitaker, late of the Stock
Exchange," as the papers put it, remained one of the many
murder-mysteries of the city of Florence.

* *