id, dictating to the clerks,
'were found amongst the criminal's possessions, and were confiscated to
the Papal Treasury.'

'But they are all good,' objected Stradella.

'Precisely,' answered the Legate. 'If anything was wanting to prove you
guilty, it was this fact. Could any one but an expert counterfeiter have
in his possession three hundred and ninety-one ducats without a single
false one, in these dishonest days? But a coiner, whose nefarious
business it is to exchange counterfeit coin for genuine, is not to be
deceived like an ordinary person.'

'But I drew the money from an honest bank in Venice----'

'Silence!' cried the Legate in a squeaky voice.

'Silence!' roared the gaolers and the sbirri with one accord, all
looking at the musician together.

The spotted cat rose sleepily at the noise, arched its back and clawed
the oak table, by way of stretching itself.

'The counterfeiter Bartolo is duly committed for trial and will be sent
to Rome in chains with the next convoy of prisoners,' said the Legate,
dictating. 'Till then,' he added, speaking to the officer, 'put him into
one of the cells at the foot of the Lion Tower. He is a criminal of some
note.'

It was worse than useless to attempt any further protest; the gaolers
seized the singer by his arms again, one on each side, and in ten
minutes he was left to his own reflections, locked up in a pitch-dark
cell that smelt like a wet grave. They had brought a lantern with them,
and had shown him a stone seat, long enough to lie down upon, and at one
end of it there was a loose block of sandstone for a pillow, a luxury
which had been provided for a political prisoner who had passed some
months in the cell under the last of the Este marquises, some eighty
years earlier, and which had doubtless been forgotten.

After he had been some time in the dark, Stradella saw that a very
feeble glimmer was visible through a square grated opening which he had
noticed in the door when the gaoler was unlocking it before entering.
Even that would be some comfort, but the unlucky musician was too
utterly overcome to think of anything but Ortensia's danger, and his own
fate sank to insignificance when compared with hers; for he was sure
that Pignaver's agents must have seized her as soon as he himself had
been taken away, and he dared not think of what would happen when they
brought her back to Venice and delivered her up to her uncle. That they
would murder the defenceless