“Poisoned?” I echoed. “Body of God! but by whom? We all loved her. There was not in Pesaro a man worthy of the name but would have laid down his life in her service. Who was there, then, to poison that dear saint?” It was then that the memory of Ramiro del’ Orca, and the look that in his eyes I had surprised whilst Madonna drank, flashed back into my mind. “Where is the Governor of Cesena?” I cried suddenly. Filippo looked at me with quick surprise. “He departed betimes this morning for his castle. Why do you ask?” I told him why I asked; I told him what I knew of Ramiro’s attentions to Madonna, of the rejection they had suffered, and of the vengeance he had seemed to threaten. Filippo heard me patiently, but when I had done he shook his head. “Why, all being as you say, should he work so wanton a destruction?” he asked stupidly, as if jealousy were not cause enough to drive an evil man to destroy that which he may not possess. “Nay, nay, your wits are disordered. You remember that he looked at Madonna whilst she drank, and you construe that into a proof that he had poisoned the cup she drank from. But then it is probable that we all looked at her in that same moment.” “But not with such eyes as his,” I insisted. “Could he have administered the poison with his own hands?” asked the doctor gravely. “No,” said I, “that were a difficult matter. But he might have bribed a servant to drop a powder in her wine.” “Why then,” said he, “it should be an easy thing to find the servant. Do you chance to remember who served the wine?” “I remember,” answered Filippo readily. “Let the man be questioned; let him be racked if necessary. Thus shall you probably arrive at a true knowledge; thus discover under whose directions he was working.” It was the only thing to do, and Filippo sent me about it there and then, telling me the servant in question was a Venetian of the name of Zabatello. If confirmation had been needed that this fellow had been the tool of the poisoner—there was no reason to suppose that he would have done the thing to have served any ends of his own—that confirmation I had upon discovering that Zabatello was fled from Pesaro, leaving no trace behind him. Men were sent out by the Lord Filippo in every direction to endeavour to find the rogue and bring him back. Whether they caught him or not seemed, after all a little thing to me. She was dead; that was the one all-absorbing, all-effacing fact that took possession of my mind, blotting out all minor matters that might be concerned with it. Even the now assured fact that she had been poisoned was a thing that found little room in my consideration on that day of my burning grief. She was dead, dead, dead! The hideous phrase boomed again and again through my distracted mind. Compared with that overwhelming catastrophe, what signified to me the how or why or when she had died. She was dead, and the world was empty.