l me Biancomonte now, Magnificent," I answered him. But my tone
was respectful, for it could profit me nothing to incense him.

"A fig for what they call you," he snapped contemptuously. "Whence are
you?"

"From Pesaro," I answered truthfully.

"From Pesaro? But you are travelling towards it."

"True. I was making for Cattolica, but I missed my way in seeking to
shorten it. I am now returning by the high-road."

The explanation satisfied him on that point, and being satisfied, he
asked me when I had left Pesaro. A moment I hesitated.

"Late last night," said I at last. He looked, at me, my foolish
hesitation having perhaps unslipped a suspicion that was straining at
its leash.

"In that case," said he, "you can scarcely have heard the strange story
that is being told there?"

I looked at him, as if puzzled, for a second. "If you mean the story of
Madonna Paoia's end, I heard it yesterday."

"Why, what story was that?" quoth he in some surprise, his beetling
brows coming together in one broad line of fur.

I shrugged my shoulders. "Men said that she had been poisoned."

"Oh, that," he cried indifferently. "But men say to-day that her
body was stolen from the Church of San Domenico where it lay. An odd
happening, is it not?" And his eyes covered me in a fierce scrutiny that
again suggested to me those suspicions of his that I might be the man
who had anticipated him. I was soon to learn that he had more grounds
than at first I thought for those same suspicions.

"Odd, indeed," I answered calmly, for all that I felt my pulses
quickening with apprehension. "But is it true?" I added.

He shrugged his shoulders. "Rumour's habit is to lie," he answered.
"Yet for such a lie as that, so monstrous an imagination would be needed
that, rather, am I inclined to account it truth. There are no more poets
in Pesaro since you left. But at what hour was it that you quitted the
city?"

To hesitate again were to betray myself; it were to suggest that I
was seeking an answer that should sort well with the rest of my story.
Besides, what could the hour signify?

"It would be about the first hour of night," I said. He looked at me
with increasing strangeness.

"You must indeed have wandered from your road to have got no farther
than this in all that time. Perhaps you were hampered by some heavy
burden?" He leered evilly, and I turned cold.

"I was burdened with nothing heavier than this body of mine and a rather
uneasy c