I studied these words attentively.  Of course I understood their drift.  She had tried to feel her way with the dead man.  She had wanted to marry me, and yet retain Guido for her lonely hours, as “her lover always!” Such a pretty, ingenious plan it was!  No thief, no murderer ever laid more cunning schemes than she, but the law looks after thieves and murderers.  For such a woman as this, law says, “Divorce her—­that is your best remedy.”  Divorce her!  Let the criminal go scot-free!  Others may do it that choose—­I have different ideas of justice!

Tying up the packet of letters again, with their sickening perfume and their blood-stained edges, I drew out the last graciously worded missive I had received from Nina.  Of course I heard from her every day—­she was a most faithful correspondent!  The same affectionate expressions characterized her letters to me as those that had deluded her dead lover—­with this difference, that whereas she inveighed much against the prosiness of marriage to Guido, to me she drew the much touching pictures of her desolate condition:  how lonely she had felt since her “dear husband’s” death, how rejoiced she was to think that she was soon again to be a happy wife—­the wife of one so noble, so true, so devoted as I was!  She had left the convent and was now at home—­when should she have the happiness of welcoming me, her best beloved Cesare, back to Naples?  She certainly deserved some credit for artistic lying; I could not understand how she managed it so well.  Almost I admired her skill, as one sometimes admires a cool-headed burglar, who has more skill, cunning, and pluck than his comrades.  I thought with triumph that though the wording of Ferrari’s will enabled her to secure all other letters she might have written to him, this one little packet of documentary evidence was more than sufficient for my purposes.  And I resolved to retain it in my own keeping till the time came for me to use it against her.

And how about D’Avencourt’s friendly advice concerning the matrimonial knot?  “A man should not walk on the edge of a precipice with his eyes shut.”  Very true.  But if his eyes are open, and he has his enemy by the throat, the edge of a precipice is a convenient position for hurling that enemy down to death in a quiet way, that the world need know nothing of!  So for the present I preferred the precipice to walking on level ground.

I rose from my seat near the Punto d’Angelo.  It was growing late in the afternoon.  From the little church below me soft bells rang out the Angelus, and with them chimed in a solemn and harsher sound from the turret of the Monte Vergine.  I lifted my hat with the customary reverence, and stood listening, with my feet deep in the grass and scented thyme, and more than once glanced up at the height whereon the venerable sanctuary held its post, like some lonely old god of memory brooding over vanished years.  There, according to tradition, was once celebrated