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 around, and unbridled by any fear of consequence or qualm of conscience, had grown overbearing, intolerant, exacting, and capricious almost to madness.

Amongst his many loves he had conceived a violent passion for the woman whom he had carried off and kept up in his mountain lair by force: that most beautiful Serapia, of whom the stranger waiting for his ransom had been too amorous. Serapia had died, and after her loss all that there had been of any softness in the nature of the man had been burnt out under the fires of his hatred of fate and rebellion against his misery; he had become a monster of cruelty, having in him the same temper as of old made the tyrants of Padova and Verona and Brescia the scourges of their generation. Even his men had begun to grow disloyal under the iron heel of his unendurable despotism, and the treachery of one of these had delivered him over into the chains of the State at which he had laughed in secure defiance for so long.

Yet the hearts of the folk in Grosseto were sad for his fate, and the old woman with the northern eyes said to her neighbours: 'Nay, I am sorry he has been