In relating this story I have not hesitated about going into particulars, since no one now can injure the good lady, who is gone to her eternal rest. She lived a few years after this adventure, and wrote to me occasionally. She died like a good Christian, loving Jesus her Redeemer, and believing in his good tidings, and detesting, with all her heart, the errors of the Church of Rome. In one of her letters she told me that her old confessor, a few months after her visit to me, came to her to inquire whether she had delivered the letter from the Inquisition; and that, fearing to compromise me, she was puzzled to find an answer. She did not so much regard her own danger, and therefore replied as follows:--"Signore, do not talk to me any more of this business: Father Achilli has too much good sense to trouble his head at all about the Inquisition: consequently, the letter found its way into the fire. What would you have me do more? For a woman I think I have done quite enough." This answer, which did not involve any falsehood, left the confessor in doubt, without furnishing him with the means of injuring either of us. He subsequently interrogated her again on this point, and all the reply he obtained was: "I know nothing about it; I have told you not to talk to me about it any more." I was myself questioned on the subject ten years afterwards, at the time I was in the Inquisition; and I got out of the affair by saying, as was the fact, that I had never received any accusation from the lady--with respect to the letter itself I was silent. But what cruelty, what malignity does not this case reveal! To pervert the natural feelings of the heart, so as to induce a wife not only to accuse her husband, but to spy out his most secret thoughts, the very inmost of his mind, and to disclose what might peril his very life! I have only given one instance, but I could relate many more of the same character. The wife of a bricklayer, whose name I never knew, about the same time, came to me at Viterbo, to accuse her husband by order of her confessor. She came from Vitorchiano, a fief of the Roman Senate. I sent her away, however, telling her I had nothing to do with the Inquisition. Several came to me from other parts--no fewer than four or five; and all these were wives, who had come to denounce their husbands to the Inquisition. I took care to give them all the same answer. And if so many cases of this sort came to my own knowledge, how many more must there have been, who applied to the Vicars themselves, or to the Inquisitors of the Holy Office!