s heaving breast.

He took up his dagger paper-knife, tried its point on his palm with two
or three reckless thrusts and threw it back on the desk. Then he went
down on his hands and knees and rummaged among the newspapers lying in
heaps under the window. At last he found what he looked for. It was the
six-chambered revolver which had been sent to him as a present. "I'll
kill the man like a dog," he thought.

He loaded the revolver, put it in his breast-pocket, went back to the
sitting-room, and made ready to go out.

X

Ten was striking on the different clocks of the city. Felice had lit the
stove in the boudoir and the wood was burning in fitful blue and red
flames. There was no other light in the room, and Roma lay with her body
on the floor, and her face buried in the couch.

The world outside was full of fearful and unusual noises. Snow was still
falling, and the voices heard through it had a peculiar sound of
sobbing. The soft rolling of thunder came from a long way off, like the
boom of a slow wave on a distant beach. At intervals there was the
crackle of musketry, like the noise of rockets sent up in the night, and
sometimes there were pitiful cries, smothered by the unreverberating
snow, like the cries of a drowning man on a foundering ship at sea.

Roma, face downward, heard these sounds in the lapses of a terrible
memory. She was seeing, as in a nightmare, the incidents of a night that
was hardly six weeks past. One by one the facts flashed back upon her
with a burning sense of shame, and she felt herself to be a sinner and a
criminal.

It was the night of the royal ball at the Quirinal. The blaze of lights,
the glitter of jewels, the brilliant throng of handsome men and lovely
women, the clash of music, the whirl of dancing, and finally the smiles
and compliments of the King. Then going home in the carriage in the
early morning, swathed in furs over her thin white silk, with the
Baron, in his decorations worn diagonally over his white breast, and
through the glass the waning moon, the silent stars, the empty streets.

Then this room, this couch, sinking down on it, very tired, with eyes
smiling and half closed, and nearly gone already into the mists of
sleep. And then the Baron at her feet, pressing his lips to her wrist
where the pulse was beating, kissing her arms and shoulders.... "Oh,
dear! You are mad! I must not listen to you." And then burning words of
love a