ck, cowled and visored figures that advanced in the lurid
light of their wax torches, I fell on my knees there in the street, and
so remained, my knees deep in the mud, my head bowed, until her sainted
body had been borne past. None heeded me. They bore her to San Domenico,
and thither I followed presently, and in the shadow of one of the
pillars of the aisle I crouched whilst the monks chanted their funereal
psalms.

The singing ended, the friars departed, and presently those of the Court
and the sight-seers from the streets began to leave the church. In an
hour I was alone--alone with the beloved dead, and there, on my knees,
I stayed, and whether I prayed or blasphemed during that horrid hour, my
memory will not let me say.

It may have been towards the third hour of night when at last I
staggered up--stiff and cramped from my long kneeling on the cold stone.
Slowly, in a half-dazed condition, I move down the aisle and gained the
door of the church. I essayed to open it. It resisted my efforts, and
then I realised that it was locked for the night.

The appreciation of my position afforded me not the slightest dismay. On
the contrary, I think my feelings were rather of relief. I had not known
whither I should repair--so distraught was my mood--and now chance had
settled the matter for me by decreeing that I should remain.

I turned and slowly I paced back until I stood beside the great black
catafalque, at each corner of which a tall wax taper was burning. My
footsteps rang with a hollow sound through the vast, gloomy spaces of
that cold, empty church; my very breathing seemed to find an echo in it.
But these were not things to occupy my mind in such a season, no more
than was the icy cold by which I was half-numbed--yet of which I seemed
to remain unconscious in the absorbing anguish that possessed me.

Near the foot of the bier there was a bench, and there I sat me down,
and resting my elbows on my knees I took my dishevelled head between my
frozen hands. My thoughts were all of her whose poor murdered clay was
there encased above me. I reviewed, I think, each scene of my life where
it had touched on hers; I evoked every word she had addressed to me
since first I had met her on the road to Cagli.

And anon my mood changed, and, from cold and frozen that it had been
by grief, it grew ablaze with the fire of anger and the lust to wreak
vengeance upon him that had brought her to this condition. Let Filippo
fear t