“What are you stopping for!  What are you stopping for!” he yelled.  “Go on—­go on—­we are not half way to Frascati yet!  Go on, I tell you!”

“Ma-che!  Eccellenza, I only stopped to ask a question!”

“What question—­what?  Is this a time for asking questions?” cried Varillo,—­“The night is falling,—­I want to get on!”

“But we are going on as fast as we can!” expostulated the driver,—­ “It is only this—­there is an albergo on the way—­where we can get food and wine.  Would the Eccellenza like to stop there?  It is as far as I can go, for I am wanted to-night in Rome.”

“Very well—­stop where you like—­only get on now!” said Varillo, pulling his head in with a jerk.  And sinking back in his seat again he wiped his hot face and cursed his miserable destiny.  It would have been all right if he had only remembered that sheath!  No one would have got on such a track of suspicion as that he, the lover and affianced husband of Angela, was her brutal assassin!

“I wrote a loving letter and sent her flowers,” he argued with himself, “when I knew she would be dead!  But her father would have got them, and he would have wired to me in Naples, and I should have come back overcome with sorrow,—­and then I should have told them all how the picture was a secret between my Angela and myself,—­how I had painted the greater part of it, and how she in her sweetness had wished me to surprise the world,—­the plan was perfect, but it is all spoiled!—­spoiled utterly through that stupid blunder of the sheath!”

Such a trifle!  It seemed to him incredible—­unjust—­that so slight a thing could intervene between him and the complete success of his meditated treachery.  For notwithstanding the fact that he had been a great reader and student of books, he now, in this particular hour of his own emergency, completely forgot what all the most astute and learned writers have always expounded to an inattentive world—­ namely, the fact that crime holds within itself the seed of punishment.  Sometimes that seed ripens quickly,—­sometimes it takes years to grow,—­but it is always there.  And it generally takes root in a mere, slight circumstance, so very commonplace and casual as to entirely escape the notice of the criminal, till the network of destiny is woven so closely about him that he can no longer avoid it,—­and then he is shown from what a trifling cause the whole result has sprung.  Varillo’s present state of mind was one of absolute torture, for he felt that whoever found the sheath of his dagger would at once recognise it and declare the owner.  If Angela had only been wounded,—­if she had found it—­she would never have given up the name of its possessor,—­the miserable man knew her straight, pure soul intimately enough for that!