se years, so that it would now open me almost any door in Italy. But
Paola stayed me. Wisely she counselled that we should do nothing that
might draw too much attention upon ourselves, and she urged me to wait
until the dawn, when the guard would be astir and the gates opened.

So we fled to the shelter of a porch, and there we waited, huddling
ourselves out of the reach of the icy rain. We talked little during the
time we spent there. For my own part I had overmuch food for thought,
and a very natural anxiety racked me. Soon the monks would be descending
to the church, and they would discover the havoc there, and spread the
alarm.

Who could say but that they might even discover the abstraction of the
two habits from the sacristy, and the hue and cry for two men in the
sackcloth of Dominicans would be afoot--for they would infer that
two men so disguised had made off with the body of Madonna Paola.
The thought stirred me like a goad. I stood up. The night was growing
thinner, and, suddenly, even as I rose, a light gleamed from one of the
Windows of the guard-house.

"God be thanked for that fellow's early rising," I cried out. "Come,
Madonna, let us be moving."

And I added my newly-conceived reasons for quitting the place without
further delay.

Cursing us for being so early abroad--a curse to which I responded with
a sonorous "Pax Domini sit tecum" the still somnolent sentinel opened
the post and let us pass. I was glad in the end that we had waited and
thus avoided the necessity of showing my ring, for should inquiries be
made concerning two monks, that ring of mine might have betrayed the
identity of one of them. I gave thanks to Heaven that I knew the country
well. A quarter of a league or so from Pesaro we quitted the high-road
and took to the by-paths with which I was well acquainted.

Day came, grey and forbidding at first, but presently the rain
ceased and the sun flashed out a thousand diamonds from the drenched
hedge-rows.

We plodded on; and at length, towards noon, when we had gained the
neighbourhood of the village of Cattolica, we halted at the hut of a
peasant on a small campagna. I had divested myself of my monk's habit,
and cut away the cowl from Madonna's. She had thereafter fashioned it
by means that were mysterious to my dull man's mind into a more
feminine-looking garb.

Thus we now presented ourselves to the old man who was the sole tenant
of that lonely and squalid house. A ducat opene