Trembling from head to foot, and scarcely able to support herself, she fixed her hat and veil afresh, put on her coat, and, taking one last fearful look at the wide-open eyes on the couch, she went backwards to the door. She dared not turn round from a creeping fear that something might touch her on the shoulder.

The door was open. No doubt Rossi had left it so, and she had not noticed the circumstance until now. She had got as far as the first landing when a poignant memory came to her--the memory of how she had first descended those stairs with Rossi, going side by side, and almost touching. The feeling that she had been fatal to the man since then nearly choked and blinded her, but it urged her on. If she remained until some one came, and the crime was discovered, what was she to say that would not incriminate her husband?

Suddenly she became aware of sounds from below--the measured footsteps of soldiers. She knew who they were. They were the Carabineers, and they were coming for Rossi, who had escaped and was being pursued.

Roma turned instantly, and with a noiseless step fled back to the door of the apartment, opened it with her latch-key, closed it silently, and bolted it on the inside. This was done before she knew what she was doing, and when she regained full possession of her faculties she was in the sitting-room, and the Carabineers were ringing at the electric bell.

They rang repeatedly. Roma stood in the middle of the floor, listening and holding her breath.

"Deuce take it!" said a voice outside. "Why doesn't the woman open the door if she doesn't want to get herself into trouble? She's at home, at all events."

"So is he, if I know anything," said a second voice. "He drove here anyway--not a doubt about that."

"Let's see the porter--he'll have another key."

"The old fool is out at the illuminations. But listen...." (the door rattled as if some one was shaking it). "This door is fastened on the inside."

There was a chuckling laugh, and then, "All right, boys! Down with it!"

A moment afterwards the door was broken open and four Carabineers were in the dining-room. Roma awaited their irruption without a word. She continued to stand in the middle of the sitting-room looking straight before her.

"Holy saints, what's this?" cried the voice she had heard first, and she knew that the Carabineers were bending over the body on the couch.

"His Excellency!"

"Lord save us!"

Roma's head was dizzy, and something more was said which she did not follow. At the next moment the Carabineers had entered the sitting-room; she was standing face to face with them, and they were questioning her.

"The Honourable Rossi is here, isn't he?"

"No," she answered in a timid voice.

"But he has been here, hasn't he?"

"No," she answered more boldly.

"Do you mean to say that the Honourable Rossi has not been here to-night?"

"I do," she said, with exaggerated emphasis.

The marshal of the Carabineers, who had been speaking, looked attentively at her for a moment, and then he called on his men to search the rooms.

"What's this?" said the marshal, taking up a sealed letter from the bureau and reading the superscription: "L'on, Davide Rossi, Carceri Giudiziarie, di Milano."

"That's a letter I wrote to my husband and haven't yet posted," said Roma.

"But what's this?" cried a voice from the dining-room. "Presented to the Honourable David Rossi by the Italian colony in Zurich."

Roma sank into a seat. It was the revolver. She had forgotten it.

"That's all right," said the marshal, with the same chuckle as before.

Dizzy and almost blind in her terror, Roma struggled to her feet. "The revolver belongs to me," she said. "Mr. Rossi left it in my keeping when he went away two months ago, and since that time he has never touched it."

"Then who fired the shot that killed his Excellency, Signora?"

"_I_ did," said Roma.

Instinctively the man removed his hat.

Within half-an-hour Roma had repeated her statement at the Regina C[oe]li, and the Carabineers, to prevent a public scandal, had smuggled the body of the Baron, under the cover of night, to his office in the Palazzo Braschi, on the opposite side of the piazza.

X

One thought was supreme in David Rossi's mind when he left the Piazza Navona--that the world in which he had lived was shaken to its foundations and his life was at an end. The unhappy man wandered about the streets without asking himself where he was going or what was to become of him.

Many feelings tore his heart, but the worst of them was anger. He had taken the life of the Baron. The man deserved his death, and he felt no pity for his victim and no remorse for his crime. But that he should have killed the Minister, he who had twice stood between him and death, he who had resisted the doctrine of violence and all his life preached the gospel of peace, this was a degradation too shameful and abject.

The woman had been the beginning and end of everything. "How I hate her!" he thought. He was telling himself for the hundredth time that he had never hated anybody so much before, when he became aware that he had returned to the neighbourhood of the Piazza Navona. Without knowing what he was doing, he had been walking round and round it.

He began to picture Roma as he had seen her that night. The beautiful, mournful, pleading face, which he had not really seen while his eyes looked on it, now rose before the eye of his mind. This caused a wave of tenderness to pass over him against his will, and his heart, so full of hatred, began to melt with love.

All the cruel words he had spoken at parting returned to his memory, and he told himself that he had been too hasty. Instead of bearing her down he should have listened to her explanation. Before the Baron entered the room she had been at the point of swearing that her love, and nothing but her love, had caused her to betray him.

He told himself she had lied, but the thought was hell, and to escape from it he made for the bank of the river again. This time he crossed the bridge of St. Angelo, and passed up the Borgo to the piazza of St.

Peter's. But the piazza itself awakened a crowd of memories. It was there in a balcony that he had first seen Roma, not plainly, but vaguely in a summer cloud of lace and sunshades.

Then it occurred to him that it must have been on this spot that Roma was inspired with the plot which had ended with his betrayal. At that thought all the bitterness of his soul returned. He told himself she deserved every word he had said to her, and blamed himself for the humiliation he had gone through in his attempt to make excuses for what she had done. To the curse he had hurled at her at the last moment he added words of fiercer anger, and though they were spoken only in his brain, or to the dark night and the rolling river, they intensified his fury.

"Oh, how I hate her!" he thought.

The _piazza_, was quiet. There was a light in the Pope's windows, and a Swiss Guard was patrolling behind the open wicket of the bronze gate to the Vatican. A porter in gorgeous livery was yawning by the door of the Prime Minister's palace. The man was waiting for his master. He would _have_ to wait.

The clock of St. Peter's struck one, and the silent place began to be peopled with many shadows. The scene of the Pope's jubilee returned to Rossi's mind. He saw and heard everything over again. The crowd, the gorgeous procession, the Pope, and last of all his own speech. A sardonic smile crossed his face in the darkness as he thought of what he had said.

"Is it possible that I can ever have believed those fables?"

He was tramping down the Trastevere, picturing his trial for the murder of the Baron, with Roma in the witness-box and himself in the dock. The cold horror of it all was insupportable, and he told himself that there was only one place in which he could escape from despair.

The unhappy man had begun to think of taking his own life. He had always condemned suicide. He had even condemned it in Bruno. But it was the death grip of a man utterly borne down, and there was nothing else to hold on to.

The day began to break, and he turned back towards the piazza of St.

Peter's, thinking of what he intended to do and where he would do it. By the end of the Hospital of Santo Spirito there was a little blind alley bounded by a low wall. Below was the quick turn of the Tiber, and no swimmer was strong enough to live long in the turbulent waters at that point. He would do it there.

The streets were silent, and in the grey dawn, that mystic hour of parturition when the day is being born and things are seen in places where they do not exist, when ships sail in the sky and mountains rise around lowland cities, David Rossi became aware in a moment that a woman was walking on the pavement in front of him. He could almost have believed that it was Roma, the figure was so tall and full and upright.

But the woman's dress was poorer, and she was carrying a bundle in her arms. When he looked again he saw that her bundle was a child, and that she was weeping over it.