The singing ended, the friars departed, and presently those of the Court and the sight-seers from the streets began to leave the church.  In an hour I was alone—­alone with the beloved dead, and there, on my knees, I stayed, and whether I prayed or blasphemed during that horrid hour, my memory will not let me say.

It may have been towards the third hour of night when at last I staggered up—­stiff and cramped from my long kneeling on the cold stone.  Slowly, in a half-dazed condition, I move down the aisle and gained the door of the church.  I essayed to open it.  It resisted my efforts, and then I realised that it was locked for the night.

The appreciation of my position afforded me not the slightest dismay.  On the contrary, I think my feelings were rather of relief.  I had not known whither I should repair—­so distraught was my mood—­and now chance had settled the matter for me by decreeing that I should remain.

I turned and slowly I paced back until I stood beside the great black catafalque, at each corner of which a tall wax taper was burning.  My footsteps rang with a hollow sound through the vast, gloomy spaces of that cold, empty church; my very breathing seemed to find an echo in it.  But these were not things to occupy my mind in such a season, no more than was the icy cold by which I was half-numbed—­yet of which I seemed to remain unconscious in the absorbing anguish that possessed me.

Near the foot of the bier there was a bench, and there I sat me down, and resting my elbows on my knees I took my dishevelled head between my frozen hands.  My thoughts were all of her whose poor murdered clay was there encased above me.  I reviewed, I think, each scene of my life where it had touched on hers; I evoked every word she had addressed to me since first I had met her on the road to Cagli.

And anon my mood changed, and, from cold and frozen that it had been by grief, it grew ablaze with the fire of anger and the lust to wreak vengeance upon him that had brought her to this condition.  Let Filippo fear to move without proofs, let him doubt such proofs as I had set before him and deem them overslender to warrant action.  Such scruples should not serve to restrain me.  I was no lukewarm brother.  Here in Pesaro I would remain until her poor body was delivered to the earth, and then I would set out upon a last emprise.  Messer Ramiro del’ Orca should account to me for this vile deed.

There in the House of Peace I sat gnawing my hands and maturing my bloody plans whilst the night wore on.  Later a still more frenzied mood obsessed me—­a burning desire to look again upon the sweet face of her I had loved, the sainted visage of Madonna Paola.  What was there to deter me?  Who was there to gainsay me?

I stood up and uttered that challenge aloud in my madness.  My voice echoed mournfully up the aisles, and the sound of the echo chilled me, yet my purpose gathered strength.