“I heard nothing; but I saw,” said the aged man, closing his eyes, as if to shut out the vision which was forced back upon his imagination; and fumbling nervously with his beads, while his pale blue lips trembled with mutterings of mechanically repeated ejaculations.

“Take your time, padre mio,” said the lawyer gently, making a gesture with his raised band, at the same time, to repress the less patient eagerness of the Commissary of Police; “we do not want to hurry you.  Tell us what it was that you saw.”

CHAPTER XII

The Case against Paolina

The old friar opened his haggard eyes, which gleamed out with a feverish light from the bottom of their sockets, and from under the shadow of his cowl, and looked piteously up into the lawyer’s face.  “A little time—­a moment to collect my thoughts,” he said, passing his parched tongue over the still dryer parchment-like skin of his drawn lips, and painfully swaying his cowled head from one side of the hard pillow to the other, while large drops of perspiration gathered on his brow.

The Commissary shot a meaning glance across the pallet on which the old man lay, to the lawyer, in evident anticipation of the importance of the revelation, heralded by so much of painful emotion.

“By all means, padre mio; collect your thoughts.  We are sorry for the necessity which obliges us to force your mind back on such painful ones,” said the lawyer, laying his hand on that of the friar, which was still fumbling with the shining bog-wood beads, scarcely more yellow than the claw-like fingers which held them.  “You saw—?”

Still no reply came from the old friar’s lips.  He writhed his body in the bed, and the manifestation of his agony became more and more intense.  The eager impatient air of the Commissary changed itself into one of persistent dogged determination; and he quietly drew from his pocket a note-book and the means of writing in it.

“Now, father, you will be able to tell us what you saw?” said the lawyer in a soothing coaxing voice.

“I saw,” said the old friar at length, speaking with his eyes again closed—­“I saw the dead body of the woman who had passed the church towards the Pineta in the morning, brought back by six men from the forest.  They passed by the western front of the church, and I saw that the body was the body of the woman I speak of.”

The Commissary shut up his note-book with a gesture of provoked disappointment, and shrugged his shoulders impatiently.

“If that is all you have to tell us, frate, you need not have made so much difficulty about it,” he said; “we knew all that before, and need not have come here to be told it.  Plenty of people saw the bringing in from the forest of the body of the murdered woman, and would give evidence to the fact without making so much ado about it.  Is that all you saw?”

“Did you not see,” said the lawyer, again motioning his companion to be patient; “did you not see another young woman in the forest yesterday morning?”