Not until they were within a matter of a hundred paces did I raise my eyes to take their measure; and then I halted on my step, smitten of a sudden by an unreasoning and unreasonable fear, to see at their head the bulky form of the Governor of Cesena. He saw me, too, and, what was worse, he recognised me on the instant, for he clapped spurs to his horse and came at me as if he would ride me down. Within three paces of me he drew up his steed. Whether the memory of the other two occasions on which I had thwarted him arose now in his mind and made him wonder had not some fatality brought me across his path again to send awry his pretty schemes concerning Madonna Paula, I cannot say for certain; yet some suspicion of it occurred to me and filled me with apprehension. “Body of Bacchus!” he roared. “Is it truly you, Boccadoro?” “They call me Biancomonte now, Magnificent,” I answered him. But my tone was respectful, for it could profit me nothing to incense him. “A fig for what they call you,” he snapped contemptuously. “Whence are you?” “From Pesaro,” I answered truthfully. “From Pesaro? But you are travelling towards it.” “True. I was making for Cattolica, but I missed my way in seeking to shorten it. I am now returning by the high-road.” The explanation satisfied him on that point, and being satisfied, he asked me when I had left Pesaro. A moment I hesitated. “Late last night,” said I at last. He looked, at me, my foolish hesitation having perhaps unslipped a suspicion that was straining at its leash. “In that case,” said he, “you can scarcely have heard the strange story that is being told there?” I looked at him, as if puzzled, for a second. “If you mean the story of Madonna Paoia’s end, I heard it yesterday.” “Why, what story was that?” quoth he in some surprise, his beetling brows coming together in one broad line of fur. I shrugged my shoulders. “Men said that she had been poisoned.” “Oh, that,” he cried indifferently. “But men say to-day that her body was stolen from the Church of San Domenico where it lay. An odd happening, is it not?” And his eyes covered me in a fierce scrutiny that again suggested to me those suspicions of his that I might be the man who had anticipated him. I was soon to learn that he had more grounds than at first I thought for those same suspicions. “Odd, indeed,” I answered calmly, for all that I felt my pulses quickening with apprehension. “But is it true?” I added. He shrugged his shoulders. “Rumour’s habit is to lie,” he answered. “Yet for such a lie as that, so monstrous an imagination would be needed that, rather, am I inclined to account it truth. There are no more poets in Pesaro since you left. But at what hour was it that you quitted the city?” To hesitate again were to betray myself; it were to suggest that I was seeking an answer that should sort well with the rest of my story. Besides, what could the hour signify?