all but that one wild moment when life at its highest had been dashed into the gulf of death.  Thought had ceased, and neither rage nor grief moved as yet across the chaos of his being.  All his life was in his eyes, as they drew up, drop by drop, the precious essence of her loveliness.  For she had grown, beneath the simplifying hand of death, strangely yet most humanly beautiful.  Life had fallen from her like the husk from the flower, and she wore the face of her first hopes.  The transition had been too swift for any backward look, any anguished rending of the fibres, and he felt himself, not detached by the stroke, but caught up with her into some great calm within the heart of change.

He knew not how he found himself once more on the steps above the square.  Below him his state carriage stood in the same place, flanked by the regiment of cavalry.  Down the narrow streets he saw the brooding cloud of people, and the sight roused his blood.  They were his enemies now—­he felt the warm hate in his veins.  They were his enemies, and he would face them openly.  No closed chariot guarded by troops—­he would not have so much as a pane of glass between himself and his subjects.  He descended the steps, bade the colonel of the regiment dismount, and sprang into his saddle.  Then, at the head of his soldiers, at a foot-pace, he rode back through the packed streets to the palace.

In the palace, courtyard and vestibule were thronged with courtiers and lacqueys.  He walked through them with his head high, the cut on his lip like the mark of a hot iron in the dead whiteness of his face.  At the head of the great staircase Maria Clementina waited.  She sprang forward, distraught and trembling, her face as blanched as his.

“You are safe—­you are safe—­you are not hurt—­” she stammered, catching at his hands.

A shudder seized him as he put her aside.

“Odo!  Odo!” she cried passionately, and made as though to bar his way.

He gave her a blind look and passed on down the long gallery to his closet.

4.11.

The joy of reprisals lasted no longer than a summer storm.  To hurt, to silence, to destroy, was too easy to be satisfying.  The passions of his ancestors burned low in Odo’s breast:  though he felt Bracciaforte’s fury in his veins he could taste no answering gratification of revenge.  And the spirit on which he would have spent his hatred was not here or there, as an embodied faction, but everywhere as an intangible influence.  The acqua tofana of his enemies had pervaded every fibre of the state.

The mist of anguish lifted, he saw himself alone among ruins.  For a moment Fulvia’s glowing faith had hung between him and a final vision of the truth; and as his convictions weakened he had replaced them with an immense pity, an all-sufficing hope.  Sentimental verbiage:  he saw it clearly now.  He had been the dupe of the old word-jugglery which was forever confounding fact and fancy in men’s