course you never touched the dog at all; is it not so ?'

Bindo opened wide his eyes, and almost grinned in his employer's face; then, recollecting himself, gasped as though his breath were failing him.

'Not I, Signore; he was stiff and stark, poor beast, when I came upon the road.'

The

'Precisely,' said Messer Nellemane. That will be put in evidence. Pastorini have long borne you a grudge, you say, and took this excuse to pay it off on you. A shocking case. A most brutal assault.'

He shook his head as he spoke, above the bed of the victim, and the pliant apothecary shook his.

'Contusion of the vertebra,' he murmured, and sympathetic action may supervene in the heart and lungs, and then--'

Hush he has youth on his side,' said Messer Nellemane tenderly, and stroked the curly head of the guard as he might have stroked a child or a puppy, had he not happened to hate both pups and children.

When he left the sick chamber, taking the parish doctor with him, the invalid sat up in bed and shouted to the old woman who waited on him.

'Give me my pipe and a beaker of that Vin Santo, and fry me some tripe and artichokes, and hand me the Book of Fate.'

The Book of Fate was the teller of dreams and foreteller of lucky numbers for the public lottery, and with this favourite literature, and his tobacco, and his wine, the murderer of Toppa passed a brave and merry day, even though he was supposed to be upon his death-bed, and was wrapped up in oil, and had begged to see the priest, and had

all the sycophants of the place (which, to do Santa Rosalia justice, were not many), coming perpetually about his door, and asking whether he was out of danger.

At home Viola was passing the bright hours weeping and kneeling before her little clay figure of the Mother of the Poor.

Old 'Nunziatina was seated beside her, rocking herself to and fro on her elm staff.

'My candle was no good!' she moaned, and yet I spent all I had!'

A.R

CHAPTER IX.

HE long bright day and the short luminous night passed, and melted

into dawn once more, and Car

melo saw the sunrise of his marriage morn glow on him from the iron bars of a prison cell. At eight of the morning the carabiniers put him in a little vehicle, and took him away to Pomodoro-Carciofi; making him sit between them, and looking very droll themselves in the little swinging springless cart, with their sabres sticking out on each side, and their cocked hats as stiff as Napoleon's upon the Vendôme column.

Pomodoro-Carciofi was a twin township, as Buda-Pest is a twin city; it was very small, very dusty, very ugly; there were a good many dyers in it, and the smell of the dye was in its atmosphere; it had a noble campanile and some fine frescoes of Luini's, but nobody ever came to look at them; it had also had an altar-piece of the Memmi's, but one fine day somebody had sold that; and it being everybody's, and so nobody's, business to punish the thief, it went unpunished, and a large oleograph was stuck up by the municipality in place of the Memmi, and the townsfolk liked it better because it had more colour in it.

The court of law was in a dull, grim, stone house that looked upon a blind wall at the back of the church that rejoiced in the oleograph; an ugly square room, which had been newly whitewashed, was the