On May 5, 1385, as she was praying in her room there, that looked out over the ravine and the town below, the door was opened very stealthily, so that the Queen thought it was one of her maids and did not turn her head to look at the intruder. Nor did she ever, in all probability, see who it was that had entered, for in the same moment a cord was slipped over her head and swiftly drawn right about her throat as only a man of strong hands could draw it; so that she died instantly, her unfinished prayer upon her lips. And the four Hungarian soldiers who had seen her die left her lying there, and went away quietly to report to their commanding officer that the thing was done as it had been ordered. And the cord with which they had done it was the same with which Andrew of Hungary had been strangled at Aversa; so, at least, it is said. CHAPTER XV NAPLES UNDER MURAT The fairest and, in some respects, the wickedest spot on the face of the earth is that wonder-city that broods by the “tideless, dolorous, midland sea,” Vesuvius smoking like some monstrous chimney of hell behind her, the deep blue, translucent glory of the sea like a drift of our Blessed Lady’s mantle before. Travelling round that bay, and on, around the point, towards Calabria, hardly a dreamy mile goes by that some of the history of thousands of years ago does not present itself. It has been the home of saints and of scholars; of soldiers a few, of statesmen a many; of some of the most beautiful characters that ever walked the earth, and of some of the very worst that ever polluted the world with their presence. At the top of the list stands St. Januarius, Bishop of Benevento, who with six of his companions came to Naples during the ninth persecution to comfort and strengthen the Faithful, and, being seized with his companions, was taken to Pozzuoli, and there flung to the wild beasts, and who, when they refused to harm him, was plunged into a blazing furnace out of which he came intact, and was thereafter beheaded; but who stands at the bottom I should be afraid to say. At this point there is an _embarras de richesses_! Of all the landmarks of history with which the kingdom of Naples is dotted, none perhaps is more rich in romance or more imbued with the spirit of tragedy than a certain straggling, half-ruined castle near the little village of Pizzo, upon the coast of Calabria. A round tower, grey and sullen with age, faces the sea; in the wall of it is set a small, heavily barred window through which one of the very few comparatively good kings of Naples looked his last upon a world which had seen him rise from a peasant to a monarch.