“That you would surely find out,” Kalmon answered.

“I have found out many things,” said Ercole gloomily.

His voice was very harsh just then, as if speaking so much had made him hoarse.

“He took some of his things away because he meant to spend the night in Rome,” Kalmon said thoughtfully.  “He means to leave to-morrow, perhaps by an early train.  If we do not find him to-night, we shall not catch him in Rome at all.”

“Surely,” said Ercole, “but Rome is very big, and it is late.”

CHAPTER XVIII

It was still raining when the three men left the villa, and the night was very dark, for the young moon had already set.  The wind howled round San Pietro in Montorio and the Spanish Academy, and whistled through the branches of the plane-trees along the winding descent, and furiously tore the withering leaves.  They struck Ercole’s weather-beaten face as he sat beside the coachman with bent head, with his soft hat pulled down over his eyes, and the rain dripped from his coarse moustache.  Kalmon and Marcello leaned as far back as they could, under the deep hood and behind the high leathern apron.

“There is some animal following us,” the cabman said to Ercole as they turned a corner.

“It is my dog,” Ercole answered.

“It sounds like a calf,” said the cabman, turning his head to listen through the storm.

“It is not a calf,” answered Ercole gruffly.  “It is my dog.  Or if you wish it to be the were-wolf, it will be the were-wolf.”

The cabman glanced uneasily at his companion on the box, for the were-wolf is a thing of terror to Romans.  But he could not see the countryman’s features in the gloom, and he hastened his horse’s pace down the hill, for he did not like the sound of those galloping feet behind his cab, in that lonely road, in the dark and the rain.

“Where am I to go?” he asked, as he came near the place where a turn to the right leads out of the Via Garibaldi down to the Via Luciano Manara.

But Kalmon knew where they were, even better than Marcello, to whom the road was familiar by day and night, in all weathers.

“We must leave that message first,” said the Professor to Marcello.  “We are coming to the turning.”

“To Santa Cecilia,” Marcello called out to the cabman, thrusting his head forward into the rain, “then I will tell you where to go.”

“Santa Cecilia,” echoed the cabman.

Ercole growled something quite unintelligible, to which his companion paid no attention, and the cab rattled on through the rain down the long paved street.  It made such a noise that the dog’s feet could not be heard any more.  There were more lamps, too, and it seemed less gloomy than up there under the plane-trees, though there were no lights in the windows at that late hour.

“Now to the right,” said Ercole, as they reached the back of Saint Cecilia’s at the Via Anicia.