in his hand—­well I knew who had given it to him!  I passed him—­he glanced up carelessly, his handsome face clearly visible in the bright moonlight—­but there was nothing about a common fisherman to attract his attention—­his look only rested upon me for a second and was withdrawn immediately.  An insane desire possessed me to turn upon him—­to spring at his throat—­to wrestle with him and throw him in the dust at my feet—­to spit at him and trample upon him—­but I repressed those fierce and dangerous emotions.  I had a better game to play—­I had an exquisite torture in store for him, compared to which a hand-to-hand fight was mere vulgar fooling.  Vengeance ought to ripen slowly in the strong heat of intense wrath, till of itself it falls—­hastily snatched before its time it is like unmellowed fruit, sour and ungrateful to the palate.  So I let my dear friend—­my wife’s consoler—­saunter on his heedless way without interference—­I passed, leaving him to indulge in amorous musings to his false heart’s content.  I entered Naples, and found a night’s lodging at one of the usual resorts for men of my supposed craft, and, strange to say, I slept soundly and dreamlessly.  Recent illness, fatigue, fear, and sorrow, all aided to throw me like an exhausted child upon the quiet bosom of slumber, but perhaps the most powerfully soothing opiate to my brain was the consciousness I had of a practical plan of retribution—­more terrible perhaps than any human creature had yet devised, so far as I knew.  Unchristian you call me?  I tell you again, Christ never loved a woman!  Had He done so, He would have left us some special code of justice.

CHAPTER IX.

I rose very early the next morning—­I was more than ever strengthened in my resolutions of the past night—­my projects were entirely formed, and nothing remained now but for me to carry them out.  Unobserved of any one I took my way again to the vault.  I carried with me a small lantern, a hammer, and some strong nails.  Arrived at the cemetery I looked carefully everywhere about me, lest some stray mourner or curious stranger might possibly be in the neighborhood.  Not a soul was in sight.  Making use of the secret passage, I soon found myself on the scene of my recent terrors and sufferings, all of which seemed now so slight in comparison with, the mental torture of my present condition.  I went straight to the spot where I had left the coffined treasure—­I possessed myself of all the rolls of paper money, and disposed them in various small packages about my person and in the lining of my clothes till, as I stood, I was worth many thousand of francs.  Then with the help of the tools I had brought, I mended the huge chest in the split places where I had forced it open, and nailed it up fast so that it looked as if it had never been touched.  I lost no time over my task, for I was in haste.  It was my intention to leave Naples for a fortnight