erwards! O, it
was midsummer frenzy that sustained him. Here in the courtyard he reeled
unconscious from the saddle; they found him drenched with blood from
head to foot; and he has been unconscious ever since. I am afraid..." He
shrugged despondently.

"Do you mean that... that he may die?" I asked scarce above a whisper.

"It will be a miracle if he does not. And that is one more crime to the
score of Pier Luigi." He said it in a tone of indescribable passion,
shaking his clenched fist at the ceiling.

The miracle did not come to pass. Two days later, in the presence of
Galeotto, Bianca, Fra Gervasio, who had been summoned from his Piacenza
convent to shrive the unfortunate baron, and myself, Ettore Cavalcanti
sank quietly to rest.

Whether he was dealt an envenomed wound, as Galeotto swore, or whether
he died as a result of the awful draining of his veins, I do not know.

At the end he had a moment of lucidity.

"You will guard my Bianca, Agostino," he said to me, and I swore it
fervently, as he bade me, whilst upon her knees beyond the bed, clasping
one of his hands that had grown white as marble, Bianca was sobbing
brokenheartedly.

Then the dying man turned his head to Galeotto. "You will see justice
done upon that monster ere you die," he said. "It is God's holy work."

And then his mind became clouded again by the mists of approaching
dissolution, and he sank into a sleep, from which he never awakened.

We buried him on the morrow in the Chapel of Pagliano, and on the
next day Galeotto drew up a memorial wherein he set forth all the
circumstances of the affair in which that gallant gentleman had met
his end. It was a terrible indictment of Pier Luigi Farnese. Of this
memorial he prepared two copies, and to these--as witnesses of all the
facts therein related--Bianca, Falcone, and I appended our signatures,
and Fra Gervasio added his own. One of these copies Galeotto dispatched
to the Pope, the other to Ferrante Gonzaga in Milan, with a request that
it should be submitted to the Emperor.

When the memorial was signed, he rose, and taking Bianca's hand in his
own, he swore by his every hope of salvation that ere another year was
sped her father should be avenged together with all the other of Pier
Luigi's victims.

That same day he set out again upon his conspirator's work, whose aim
was not only the life of Pier Luigi, but the entire shattering of
the Pontifical sway in Parma and Piacenza. Some days