Whether from innate distrustfulness, or presage of coming evil, the Duchess put off her journey till quite late, and only arrived there as night was coming on.  At the entrance to the Villa the Duke met her, holding in a leash two splendid hare-hounds, which he begged her to accept and use on the morrow.

The dinner-party was numerous and merry, but not one of the company was gayer than the host.  Isabella sat beside him, and he offered her many lover-like attentions.  Everybody remarked these excellent and unusual relations between the Duke and Duchess, and wondered greatly thereat.  After a very pleasant musical evening the company separated for the night, and the Duke, passing into his own bedchamber, invited his wife to enter with him.

Was it instinct or was it second sight, which caused Isabella’s steps to falter on the threshold?  She trembled as her husband held aside the arras, turned deadly pale, and, retreating for a moment, she whispered to her lady-in-waiting, Donna Lucrezia de’ Frescobaldi—­“Shall I enter, or shall I not?” Bracciano’s voice again was raised in gentle persuasiveness, and taking her by her hand, clammy cold as it was, he asked her, laughingly, why she held back.

She bade Donna Lucrezia good-night very tremulously, and then the curtain fell, and Isabella was alone with her lord.  The room was in its usual state, but truth to tell, she had not lain there for many a long night, and, as the Duke continued to talk affectionately, and to prepare for bed, she began to feel less alarm.  Without more ado she flung herself into a deep lounging-chair and began to meditate and to chatter.

Seating himself by her side, Bracciano began to caress her hands and to fondle her in his arms, and when he noted that she had given herself entirely to his will and pleasure, as an amorous, faithful wife once more, he swiftly reached down for a corda di collo—­a horse’s halter—­which he had placed behind the chair.  Implanting an impassioned kiss upon those lovely lips, which had so long yearned for a husband’s embrace, he adroitly threw the rope round his wife’s neck, and pulling it taut in a wild access of rage, he strangled her—­holding on until her struggles ceased!

Then he cast her fair body from him, and spurned it with his foot, as though it had been some foul and loathsome thing.  Thus perished, in her thirty-sixth year, Isabella de’ Medici, wife of Paolo Giordano d’Orsini—­as sinful as she was lovely, but much more sinned against than sinning after all.

Before the dawn of day the Duke, accompanied by one attendant only, rode into Florence, and left at the Palazzo Pitti a heartless message for the Grand Duke, requesting him to despatch the brethren of the Misericordia to Cerreto Guidi, where was “something which required their attention”—­then he continued his course straight on to Rome.

Florence was aghast at this horror, but the Grand Duke Francesco kept his own counsel, and no pursuit followed the murderer.  An official announcement was made to the effect that “The Duchess of Bracciano died in a fit of apoplexy.”  This nobody for a moment believed:  whether her brother was privy to the deed is perhaps open to doubt, for he and Isabella were devoted to one another.