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 it, but even to hinder it they would have had but scant energy.

She went by under the shade cast by the projecting roofs unseen by any of them. She gathered from their talk that the carabineers had searched through the place, then ridden on; men were saying to one another that they remembered Saturnino Mastarna, remembered the day the guards had brought him down from the hills with his feet tied under his horse's belly for the market crowd to gaze at in dull Grosseto.

'He was a brave man,' they said with a reverence in their voices that they never gave to the guardians of the law.

'He was brave, thought Musa as she heard. 'Then it must be right to save him.'

She went to her own home.

All was locked and barred; but she pushed herself through the stable windows by withdrawing the wooden shutter on the outside.

Leone did not give tongue; he came to her in silence, only moving his tail with welcome. Joconda lay in a sound slumber, so sound that she might have been murdered in her sleep without awaking. A gleam from the moon came in and fell on