had been,
Indeed: the event could not be worse, you know:
One more half-hour of her saved! She's dead now, Sirs!"

As they again drove forward, she asked him if, supposing she were to die
now, he would account it to be in sin? The woman at the inn had told her
about the trees that turn away from the north wind with the nests they
hold; she thought she might be like those trees. . . . But soon,
half-sleeping again, and restless now with returning fears, she seemed
to wander in her mind; once she addressed him as "Gaetano." . . .
Afterwards he knew that this name (the name of a newly-made saint) was
that which she destined for her child, if she was given a son:

"One who has only been made a saint--how long?
Twenty-five years: so, carefuller, perhaps,
To guard a namesake than those old saints grow,
Tired out by this time--see my own five saints!"[146:1]

For "little Pompilia" had been given five names by her pretended
parents:

". . . so many names for one poor child
--Francesca Camilla Vittoria Angela
Pompilia Comparini--laughable!"[146:1] . . .

But now Caponsacchi himself grew restless, nervous: here was
Castelnuovo, as good as Rome:

"Say you are saved, sweet lady!"

She awoke. The sky was fierce with the sunset colours--suddenly she
cried out that she must not die:

"'Take me no farther, I should die: stay here!
I have more life to save than mine!' She swooned.
We seemed safe: what was it foreboded so?"

He carried her,

"Against my heart, beneath my head bowed low,
As we priests carry the paten,"

into the little inn and to a couch, where he laid her, sleeping deeply.
The host urged him to leave her in peace till morn.

"Oh, my foreboding! But I could not choose."

All night he paced the passage, throbbing with fear from head to foot,
"filled with a sense of such impending woe" . . . and at the first pause
of night went to the courtyard, ordered the horses--the last moment
came, he must awaken her--he turned to go:

". . . And there
Faced me Count Guido."

Oh, if he had killed him then! if he had taken the throat in "one great
good satisfying gripe," and abolished Guido with his lie! . . . But
while he mused on the irony of such a miscreant calling _her_ his wife,

"The minute, oh the misery, was gone;"

--two police-officers stood beside, and Guido was ordering th