“But not with such eyes as his,” I insisted.

“Could he have administered the poison with his own hands?” asked the doctor gravely.

“No,” said I, “that were a difficult matter.  But he might have bribed a servant to drop a powder in her wine.”

“Why then,” said he, “it should be an easy thing to find the servant.  Do you chance to remember who served the wine?”

“I remember,” answered Filippo readily.

“Let the man be questioned; let him be racked if necessary.  Thus shall you probably arrive at a true knowledge; thus discover under whose directions he was working.”

It was the only thing to do, and Filippo sent me about it there and then, telling me the servant in question was a Venetian of the name of Zabatello.  If confirmation had been needed that this fellow had been the tool of the poisoner—­there was no reason to suppose that he would have done the thing to have served any ends of his own—­that confirmation I had upon discovering that Zabatello was fled from Pesaro, leaving no trace behind him.

Men were sent out by the Lord Filippo in every direction to endeavour to find the rogue and bring him back.  Whether they caught him or not seemed, after all a little thing to me.  She was dead; that was the one all-absorbing, all-effacing fact that took possession of my mind, blotting out all minor matters that might be concerned with it.  Even the now assured fact that she had been poisoned was a thing that found little room in my consideration on that day of my burning grief.

She was dead, dead, dead!  The hideous phrase boomed again and again through my distracted mind.  Compared with that overwhelming catastrophe, what signified to me the how or why or when she had died.  She was dead, and the world was empty.

For hours I sat on the rocks, alone by the sea, on that stormy day of December, and I indulged my grief where no prying eyes could witness it, amid the solitude of wild and angry Nature.  And the moan and thud with which the great waves hurled themselves against the base of the black rock on which I was perched afforded but a feeble echo of the storm that raged and beat within my desolated soul.

She was dead, dead, dead!  The waves seemed to shout it as they leapt up and spattered me with brine; the wind now moaned it piteously, now shrieked it fiercely as it scudded by, wrapping its invisible coils about me, and seeming intent on tearing me from my resting-place.

Towards evening, at last, I rose, and skirting the Castle, I entered the town, dishevelled and bedraggled, yet caring nothing what spectacle I might afford.  And presently a grim procession overtook me, and at sight of the black, cowled and visored figures that advanced in the lurid light of their wax torches, I fell on my knees there in the street, and so remained, my knees deep in the mud, my head bowed, until her sainted body had been borne past.  None heeded me.  They bore her to San Domenico, and thither I followed presently, and in the shadow of one of the pillars of the aisle I crouched whilst the monks chanted their funereal psalms.