I handed him the weapon, telling him that I had loaded it myself overnight, but that if he wished to satisfy himself, I had both powder and ball at his service.

He looked somewhat offended.  “Do you think, my lad, that I doubt you?” he said.  “I tell you that I love you.  I would as soon doubt my mother, who is in Heaven, or believe my father, who is not.”

“You shall join one or the other of them,” said I, “in a few moments.  Have no doubt of that, and let me alone.  One condition.  I will drop my arm and walk into the house, placing my back at your disposal, if you, in the article of death, as you now stand, will pledge your word to save Virginia from Semifonte.  What do you say?”

He gazed at me, open-mouthed, eyes aglow, as I stood waiting.  I could see that he was torn; I could see the fiend working and gouging within him, and (I believe) a good angel contending against him.  Some time this lasted.  Then Palamone gave a bitter laugh—­like the barking of a leopard in the night.

“Say?” he mocked me.  “Why, I say that you are an exquisite, adorable fool—­the very pink of fools.  For two ticks I would have taken you at your word.  For two ticks.”

“It was the third that prevented you,” says I.  “You are not such a villain as you think yourself.”

“I believe that I am not, indeed,” he says ruefully.  “I have lost a chance.  Well, I am ready.  But here the shadow is bad.  Let us go to the obelisks and stand each back to one.  There is a passable light there.”

“As you will.”  I went directly out into the middle of the Piazza, and he followed—­with my life between his wild hands.

I know not to this hour whether that act of mine was one of sublime courage or of the crassest folly; I remember that I strode blithely forward, and that he followed; that some chance thing or another caused me to turn my head—­the sun burning in a casement, a pigeon, a cat, some speck of accident.  That motion saved my life, for immediately afterwards I heard the report, and felt the ball flicker through my hair.  The fiend had gouged him again, and he had tried to murder me.  At that certainty, in all the fury of disgust that came with it, my stomach turned, and I was possessed by blind rage.  I rounded full upon him, and he must have seen cold death in my eyes, for round went he too and ran for his life.  I pelted after him.

He made for the angle of the church whence he had come.  There were railings there about a loggia, much broken down, by which, I suppose, he hoped to get some sort of a screen, but I intended him to fight me in the Piazza, so increased my speed, and cut him off that retreat.  He doubled, and scoured past the steps of the church, round by the hospital, making for the Via del Fosso; I cut a segment of his circle and stopped him there.  Round he span, slavering at the lips, and went dead over the Piazza, to the obelisks, I so close on his traces that I could not