ost
instinctive suspicion caught and chilled me. Who was it came at such an
hour? What could any man seek in the Church of San Domenico at dead of
night? Was the church indeed their goal, or were they but passers-by?

That last question went not long unanswered. The steps came nearer,
whilst I stood appalled, my skin roughening like a dog's. They halted at
the door. Something heavy hurtled against it.

A voice, the voice of Ramiro del' Orca--I knew it upon the
instant--reached my ears which concentration had rendered superacute.

"It is locked, Baldassare. Get out those tools of yours and force it."

My wits were working now at fever-pace. It may be that I am swift of
thought beyond the ordinary man, or it may be that what then came to me
was either a flash of inspiration or the conclusion to which I leapt by
instinct. But in that moment the whole plot of Madonna's poisoning was
revealed to me. Poisoned she had been--aye, but by some drug that did
but produce for a little while the outward appearance of death so truly
simulated as to deceive the most experienced of doctors. I had heard
of such poisons, and here, in very truth, was one of them at work. His
vengeance on her for her indifference to his suit was not so clumsy
and primitive as that of simply slaying her. He had, by his infernal
artifice, intended, secretly, to bear her off. To-morrow when men found
a broken church-door and a violated bier, they would set the sacrilege
down to some wizard who had need of the body for his dark practices of
magic.

I cursed myself in that hour that I had not earlier been moved to peer
into her coffin whilst yet there might have been time to have saved her.
Now? The sweat stood out in beads upon my brow. At that door there were,
to judge by the sound of footsteps and of voices, some three or four men
besides Messer Ramiro. For only weapon I had my dagger. What could I
do with that to defend her? Ramiro's plan would suffer no frustration
through my discovery; when to-morrow the sacrilege was discovered the
cold body of Lazzaro Biancomonte lying beside the desecrated bier would
be but an item in the work of profanation they would find--an item that
nowise would modify the conclusion to which I anticipated they would
come.

CHAPTER XIV. REQUIESCAT!

A strange and mysterious thing is the working of terror on the human
mind. Some it renders incapable of thought or action, paralysing their
limbs and stagnating the bloo