“Of what harm do you speak, Madonna?” he cried, in a voice laden with concern.

“Of what harm,” she echoed, eyeing him with a scorn that would have slain him had he any manhood left.  “Of what harm?  Mother of Mercy, defend me!  Do you ask the question?  What greater harm could have come to me than to have fallen into the hands of Ramiro del’ Orca and his brigands?”

He stood looking at her, and I doubt not that his face was a very picture of simulated consternation.

“Surely, Madonna, you do not understand that we are your friends, that you can so abuse us.  But you will be faint, Madonna,” he cried, with a fresh and deep solicitude.  “A cup of wine.”  And he waved his hand towards the table.

“It would poison me, I think,” she answered coldly.

“You are cruel, and—­alas!—­mistrustful,” said he.  “Can you guess nothing of the anxiety that has been mine these two days, of the fears that have haunted me as I thought of you and your wanderings?”

Her lip curled, and her face took on some slight vestige of colour.  Her spirit was a thing for which I might then have come to love her had it not been that already I loved her to distraction.

“Yes,” said she, “I can guess something of your dismay when you found your schemes frustrated; when you found that you had come too late to San Domenico.”

“Will you not forgive me that shift to which my adoration drove me?” he implored, in a honeyed voice—­and a more fearful thing than Ramiro the butcher was Ramiro the lover.

At that scarcely covert avowal of his passion she recoiled a step as she might before a thing unclean.  The little colour faded from her cheek, the scorn departed from her lip, and a sickly, deadly fear overspread her lovely face.  God! that I should stand there and witness this insult to the woman I adored and worshipped with a fervour that the Church seeks to instil into us for those about the throne of Heaven.  It might not be.  A blind access of fury took me.  Of the consequences I thought nothing.  Reason left me utterly, and the slight hope that might lie in temporising was disregarded.

Before those about me could guess my purpose, or those others, too engrossed in the scene at the far end of the hall, could intervene, I had sprung from between the executioners and dashed across the space that separated me from the Governor of Cesena.  One well-aimed blow, and there should be an end to Messer Ramiro.  That was the only thought that found room in my disordered mind.

One or two there were who cried out as I sped past them, swift as the hound when it speeds after the fleeing hare.  But I was upon Ramiro ere any could have sufficiently mastered his surprise to interfere.