“I have paid him in his own coin,” he said, “but I think we had best be off.”

“Go, my dear Malcolm,” I told him.  “Do not delay a moment.  I shall not leave Florence in any case.”

“Are you mad, my dear?” he cried.  I said that I had no notion whether I was mad or not; but that I had work to do in Florence, and intended to finish it.  I persuaded him at last to get away to Lucca at once, where I hoped to join him.  The doctor came up to report Semifonte quite dead.

I returned to the count, who said to me, “Every man over forty is, and must be, a liar, since, in a sense, his very existence is a lie.  If it will satisfy you, I will assure you that I am over forty.”

I accepted that periphrasis.  “And now,” I said, “I will tell you to whom you owe your life.  It is to that lady whom you have dared to traduce—­to her and no other.  I gather that you will not repeat your slander.”

“I promise you that, sir,” said he.  “But I am curious to learn how Donna Aurelia can have interceded.”

“Her name in maidenhood,” I said, “was Aurelia Gualandi.  There upon your handkerchief I read her initials, ‘A.  G.’”

“The handkerchief is my own, I swear it!” he cried with passion.  “Will you make the merest coincidence accuse her again?  Shame upon you, sir.”

“Never in the world,” said I.  “I never doubted but it was your own.  The cipher saved you, not the handkerchief.”

I suppose that he was too faint by now to understand me, for he only put his hand up and shook it to and fro.  “Exquisite fool!” I heard him say, and then with a groan, “Gesu, I die!” he fainted in earnest.  I helped the surgeon carry him to his coach, then walked to my lodging, leaving the marchese astare at the trees.

CHAPTER XLVI

THE DISCOVERY

I was to dine that night with the Prior of Saint Mark’s, a former acquaintance of mine, and I kept my engagement, though I left the party early.  My wound, which was painful but not dangerous, was not the cause of that.  The fact is that I was arrested while we were sitting over our fruit and wine, at a moment when I was enunciating a favourite theory of mine that this world is a garden for every man alive of us who happens to be a gardener, and for no other; and that he only is a gardener who lives for the joy of his labour and not for the material profit he can make out of his toil.  The Grand Inquisitor—­that pock-marked Dominican who had treated me with uncharitable harshness upon my first visit to Florence—­was present at table, and was upon the point of denouncing my argument as perverse, unchristian and I know not what else; he had said, “It is my deliberate opinion that detestable beliefs as are Atheism, Calvinism, Mahometanism and the tenets of the Quietists, it were better for a man to embrace all of them in one vast, comprehensive blasphemy, than depend for their refutation