But "true Carlo" was dead--your honest men are ever so--dead in the wars of Germany and Spain. And Gonsalvo di Vasari, the last relative and next heir, seemed less curious to revenge his kinsman's death than to inherit. No man in Florence doubted Gonsalvo's courage, but still his dagger slept in its sheath. It might be he believed his cousin had taken no wrong; or it might be that--take the worst to be proved--his conscience whispered he might have juster cause of quarrel. But week after week elapsed, and even month after month; and though all concluded the absent Lorenzo to be dead, yet no certain tidings even of his death could be obtained, so that the title to his large estates remained in abeyance. The disappearance of the servant Jacopo, too, seemed more puzzling to many people than any other part of the affair. When one morning, about ten weeks after the absentees had been lost sight of, and while men were still debating whether they had been swallowed up, horses, arms, purses, and all, by some local earthquake, or translated suddenly to the skies, and there converted into constellations, as a great mob was sweeping over the piazza Santa Croce, conducting a robber, who had just been condemned, to the place of execution, a citizen, whom accident or curiosity had drawn close to the person of the culprit, suddenly exclaimed, that "he wore a cloak which had belonged to Lorenzo di Vasari!" "Holy Virgin! will you not hear what I say?" insisted the person who thus stopped his fellow-creatures on their passage to the other world.--"Should I not know the cloak, when I made it myself?" he continued. Which was at least so far likely to be true, that the spokesman was a tailor. "But the man is going to be hanged, and what more can you have if he had stolen fifty cloaks?" replied the superintending officer, giving the word that the cavalcade, which had halted, should again move forward.