ent bounding down the loggia,
screaming as he ran, until he came to his wife's door. Against that he
hurled himself, calling her.

"Giovanna! Giovanna! For the love of God crucified! Open! Open! I am
being murdered!"

From within came no answer--utter silence.

"Giovanna! Giovanna!" He beat frenziedly upon the door.

Still no answer, which yet was answer enough.

The stranglers, momentarily discomfited, scared, too, lest his cries
should rouse the convent, had stood hesitating after he broke from them.
But now Bertrand d'Artois, realizing that too much had been done already
to admit of the business being left unfinished, sprang upon him suddenly
again. Locked in each other's arms, those wrestlers swayed and panted in
the loggia for a moment, then with a crash went down, Bertrand on
top, Andreas striking his head against the stone floor as he fell. The
Queen's lover pinned him there, kneeling upon his breast.

"The rope!" he panted to the others who came up.

One of them threw him a coil of purple silk interwrought with gold
thread, in which a running noose had been tied. Bertrand slipped it
over Andreas's head, drew it taut, and held it so, despite the man's
desperate, convulsive struggles. The others came to his assistance.
Amongst them they lifted the writhing victim to the parapet of the
loggia, and flung him over; whilst Bertrand, Cabane, and Pace bore upon
the rope, arresting his fall, and keeping him suspended there until he
should be dead. Melazzo and Morcone came to assist them, and it was then
that Cabane observed that Terlizzi held aloof, as if filled with horror.

Peremptorily he called to him:

"Hither, and lend a hand! The rope is long enough to afford you a grip.
We want accomplices, not witnesses, Lord Count."

Terlizzi obeyed, and then the ensuing silence was broken suddenly by
screams from the floor below the screams of a woman who slept in the
room immediately underneath, who had awakened to behold in the grey
light of the breaking day the figure of a man kicking and writhing at a
rope's end before her window.

Yet a moment the startled stranglers kept their grip of the rope until
the struggles at the end of it had ceased; then they loosed their hold
and let the body go plunging down into the Abbot's garden. Thereafter
they scattered and fled, for people were stirring now in the convent,
aroused by the screams of the woman.

Thrice, so the story runs, came the monks to the Queen's door to