onscience."

"Where, then, have you tarried?"

At this I thought it time to rebel. Were I too meekly to submit to this
examination, my very meekness might afford him fresh grounds for doubts.

"Once have I told you," I answered wearily, "that I lost my way. And,
however much it may flatter me to have your Excellency evincing such an
interest in my concerns, I am at a loss to find a reason for it."

He leered prodigiously once more, and his eyebrows shot up to the level
of his cap.

"I will tell you, brute beast," he answered me. "I question you because
I suspect that you are hiding something from me."

"What should I hide from your Excellency?"

He dared not enlighten me on that point, for should his suspicions prove
unfounded he would have uselessly betrayed himself.

"If you are honest, why do you lie?"

"I?" I ejaculated. "In what have I lied?"

"In that you have told me that you left Pesaro at the first hour of
night. At the third hour you were still in the Church of San Domenico,
whither you followed Madonna Paola's bier."

It was my turn to knit my brows. "Was I indeed?" quoth I. "Why, yes, it
may well be. But what of that? Is the hour in which I quitted Pesaro a
matter of such moment as to be worth lying over? If I said that I left
about the first hour, it is because I was under the impression that it
was so. But I was so distraught by grief at Madonna's death that I may
have been careless in my account of time."

"More lies," he blazed with sudden passion. "It may have been the third
hour, you say. Fool, the gates of Pesaro close at the second hour of
night. Where are your wits?"

Outwardly calm, but inwardly in a panic--more for Madonna's sake than
for my own--I promptly held out the hand on which I wore the Borgia
ring. In a flash of inspiration did that counter suggest itself to me.

"There is a key that will open any gate in Romagna at any hour."

He looked at the ring, and of what passed in his mind I can but offer a
surmise. He may have remembered that once before I had fooled him
with the help of that gold circlet; or he may have thought that I
was secretly in the service of the Borgias, and that, acting in their
interests, I had carried off Madonna Paola. Be that as it may, the sight
of the ring threw him into a fury. He turned on his horse.

"Lucagnolo!" he called, and a man of officer's rank detached himself
from the score of men-at-arms and rode forward. "Let six men escort me
home