Groans and hisses received her, but the mob hung back, as though her look had checked them.  Then a voice shrieked out:  “Down with the atheist!  We want no foreign witches!” and another caught it up with the yell:  “She poisoned the weaver’s boy!  Her father was hanged for murdering Christian children!”

The cry set the crowd in motion again, and it rolled toward the line of mounted soldiers at the foot of the steps.  The men had their hands on their holsters; but the Duke’s call rang out:  “No firing!” and drawing their blades, they sat motionless to receive the shock.

It came, dashed against them and dispersed them.  Only a few yards lay now between the people and their sovereign.  But at that moment another shot was fired.  This time it came from the thick of the crowd.  The equerries’ swords leapt forth again, and they closed around the Duke and Fulvia.

“Save yourself, sir!  Back into the building!” one of the gentlemen shouted; but Odo had no eyes for what was coming.  For as the shot was heard he had seen a change in Fulvia.  A moment they had stood together, smiling, undaunted, hands locked and wedded eyes, then he felt her dissolve against him and drop between his arms.

A cry had gone out that the Duke was wounded, and a leaden silence fell on the crowd.  In that silence Odo knelt, lifting Fulvia’s head to his breast.  No wound showed through her black gown.  She lay as though smitten by some invisible hand.  So deep was the hush that her least whisper must have reached him; but though he bent close no whisper came.  The invisible hand had struck the very source of life; and to these two, in their moment of final reunion, with so much unsaid between them that now at last they longed to say, there was left only the dumb communion of fast-clouding eyes...

A clatter of cavalry was heard down the streets that led to the square.  The equerry sent to warn Fulvia had escaped from the back of the building and hastened to the barracks to summon a regiment.  But the soldiery were no longer needed.  The blind fury of the mob had died of its own excess.  The rumour that the Duke was hurt brought a chill reaction of dismay, and the rioters were already scattering when the cavalry came in sight.  Their approach turned the slow dispersal to a stampede.  A few arrests were made, the remaining groups were charged by the soldiers, and presently the square lay bare as a storm-swept plain, though the people still hung on its outskirts, ready to disband at the first threat of the troops.

It was on this solitude that the Duke looked out as he regained a sense of his surroundings.  Fulvia had been carried into the audience-chamber and laid on the dais, her head resting on the velvet cushions of the ducal chair.  She had died instantly, shot through the heart, and the surgeons summoned in haste had soon ceased from their ineffectual efforts.  For a long time Odo knelt beside her, unconscious of