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 had been so kept at musket's length by the guards that no one had heard a syllable of what had been said.

'I knew him years agone,' she answered, 'and he bade me hang this image in some chapel, that Our Lady may have grace to him. Nay, hands off; it shall go where he told me. And he whom you call your Saturnino needs heaven's mercy sorely; for he was a murderer many times—many times.'

For these were her foolish notions, she being a woman from the north.

More they could not get out of her. She carried the empty wine-cup back to the wine-shop, and then made her way quietly out of the square by a narrow lane.

The people stood about in a silent, sad, sullen mob; discomfited and dissatisfied with themselves that they had not struck a blow for their hero.

Saturnino Mastarna had been a robber; and, as she had justly said, a murderer many times. He had swooped down on the lonely mountain paths above the mountain-born Fiora, and along the once consular and imperial highway that runs through Orbetello and Civita Vecchia to Rome, even as the pseudœtus eagle of these hills swoops down