em. Only a few yards lay
now between the people and their sovereign. But at that moment another
shot was fired. This time it came from the thick of the crowd. The
equerries' swords leapt forth again, and they closed around the Duke and
Fulvia.

"Save yourself, sir! Back into the building!" one of the gentlemen
shouted; but Odo had no eyes for what was coming. For as the shot was
heard he had seen a change in Fulvia. A moment they had stood together,
smiling, undaunted, hands locked and wedded eyes, then he felt her
dissolve against him and drop between his arms.

A cry had gone out that the Duke was wounded, and a leaden silence fell
on the crowd. In that silence Odo knelt, lifting Fulvia's head to his
breast. No wound showed through her black gown. She lay as though
smitten by some invisible hand. So deep was the hush that her least
whisper must have reached him; but though he bent close no whisper came.
The invisible hand had struck the very source of life; and to these two,
in their moment of final reunion, with so much unsaid between them that
now at last they longed to say, there was left only the dumb communion
of fast-clouding eyes...

A clatter of cavalry was heard down the streets that led to the square.
The equerry sent to warn Fulvia had escaped from the back of the
building and hastened to the barracks to summon a regiment. But the
soldiery were no longer needed. The blind fury of the mob had died of
its own excess. The rumour that the Duke was hurt brought a chill
reaction of dismay, and the rioters were already scattering when the
cavalry came in sight. Their approach turned the slow dispersal to a
stampede. A few arrests were made, the remaining groups were charged by
the soldiers, and presently the square lay bare as a storm-swept plain,
though the people still hung on its outskirts, ready to disband at the
first threat of the troops.

It was on this solitude that the Duke looked out as he regained a sense
of his surroundings. Fulvia had been carried into the audience-chamber
and laid on the dais, her head resting on the velvet cushions of the
ducal chair. She had died instantly, shot through the heart, and the
surgeons summoned in haste had soon ceased from their ineffectual
efforts. For a long time Odo knelt beside her, unconscious of all but
that one wild moment when life at its highest had been dashed into the
gulf of death. Thought had ceased, and neither rage nor grief moved as
yet across the