Then they took me up very softly, and bore me to the door from which I had fled forth.  Lucia walked with me.  In the dusk of the leaves, while the bearers were fumbling with the inner doors, which would swing in their faces, Lucia put her hot lips to my hand, which she had held kindly in hers all the way.

“Pardon me, Douglas,” she said, and there was a break in her voice.  I felt the ocean of tears rising about me, and feared that I could not find the words fittingly to answer.  For the pain had made me weak.

“Nay,” I said at last, just over my breath, “it was my folly.  Forgive me, little Saint Lucy of the Eyes!  It was—­it was—­what was it that it was?—­I have forgotten—­”

“An error in judgment!” said Saint Lucy of the Eyes, and forgave me, though I cannot remember more about it.

I suppose I could take the title if I chose, for these things are easily arranged in Italy; but Lucia and I think it will keep for the second Stephen Douglas.

IV

UNDER THE RED TERROR

  What of the night, O Antwerp bells,
    Over the city swinging,
  Plaintive and sad, O kingly bells,
    In the winter midnight ringing?

  And the winds in the belfry moan
  From the sand-dunes waste and lone,
    And these are the words they say,
   The turreted bells and they—­

    "Calamtout, Krabbendyk, Calloo,”
    Say the noisy, turbulent crew;
    “Jabbeke, Chaam, Waterloo;
    Hoggerhaed, Sandvaet, Lilloo,
    We are weary, a-weary of you! 
    We sigh for the hills of snow,
    For the hills where the hunters go,
    For the Matterhorn, Wetterhorn, Dom,
    For the Dom!  Dom!  Dom! 
  For the summer sun and the rustling corn,
  And the pleasant vales of the Rhineland valley.”

  “The Bells of Antwerp.”

I am writing this for my friend in Scotland, whose strange name I cannot spell.  He wishes to, put it in the story-book he is writing.  But his book is mostly lies.  This is truth.  I saw these things, and I write them down now because of the love I have for him, the young Herr who saved my brother’s life among the black men in Egypt.  Did I tell how our Fritz went away to be Gordon’s man in the Soudan of Africa, and how he wrote to our father and the mother at home in the village—­“I am a great man and the intendant of a military station, and have soldiers under me, and he who is our general is hardly a man.  He has no fear, and death is to him as life”?  So this young Herr, whom I love the same as my own brother, met Fritz when there was not the thickness of a Wurst-skin between him and the torture that makes men blanch for thinking on, and I will now tell you the story of how he saved him.  It was—­