I shrugged my shoulders.  “Men said that she had been poisoned.”

“Oh, that,” he cried indifferently.  “But men say to-day that her body was stolen from the Church of San Domenico where it lay.  An odd happening, is it not?” And his eyes covered me in a fierce scrutiny that again suggested to me those suspicions of his that I might be the man who had anticipated him.  I was soon to learn that he had more grounds than at first I thought for those same suspicions.

“Odd, indeed,” I answered calmly, for all that I felt my pulses quickening with apprehension.  “But is it true?” I added.

He shrugged his shoulders.  “Rumour’s habit is to lie,” he answered.  “Yet for such a lie as that, so monstrous an imagination would be needed that, rather, am I inclined to account it truth.  There are no more poets in Pesaro since you left.  But at what hour was it that you quitted the city?”

To hesitate again were to betray myself; it were to suggest that I was seeking an answer that should sort well with the rest of my story.  Besides, what could the hour signify?”

“It would be about the first hour of night,” I said.  He looked at me with increasing strangeness.

“You must indeed have wandered from your road to have got no farther than this in all that time.  Perhaps you were hampered by some heavy burden?” He leered evilly, and I turned cold.

“I was burdened with nothing heavier than this body of mine and a rather uneasy conscience.”

“Where, then, have you tarried?”

At this I thought it time to rebel.  Were I too meekly to submit to this examination, my very meekness might afford him fresh grounds for doubts.

“Once have I told you,” I answered wearily, “that I lost my way.  And, however much it may flatter me to have your Excellency evincing such an interest in my concerns, I am at a loss to find a reason for it.”

He leered prodigiously once more, and his eyebrows shot up to the level of his cap.

“I will tell you, brute beast,” he answered me.  “I question you because I suspect that you are hiding something from me.”

“What should I hide from your Excellency?”

He dared not enlighten me on that point, for should his suspicions prove unfounded he would have uselessly betrayed himself.

“If you are honest, why do you lie?”

“I?” I ejaculated.  “In what have I lied?”

“In that you have told me that you left Pesaro at the first hour of night.  At the third hour you were still in the Church of San Domenico, whither you followed Madonna Paola’s bier.”

It was my turn to knit my brows.  “Was I indeed?” quoth I.  “Why, yes, it may well be.  But what of that?  Is the hour in which I quitted Pesaro a matter of such moment as to be worth lying over?  If I said that I left about the first hour, it is because I was under the impression that it was so.  But I was so distraught by grief at Madonna’s death that I may have been careless in my account of time.”