“I, too, am going hence,” he said. “Be of good courage, Agostino. There is no effort I will not make on your behalf.” In a broken voice he added his farewells ere he stood back at the captain's peremptory bidding. The little troop closed round me, and thus, within a couple of hours of my coming, I departed again from Mondolfo, surrendered to the hangman by the pious hands of my mother, who on her knees, no doubt, would be thanking God for having afforded her the grace to act in so righteous a manner. Once only did my cousin address me, and that was soon after we had left the town behind us. He motioned the men away, and rode to my side. Then he looked at me with mocking, hating eyes. “You had done better to have continued in your saint's trade than have become so very magnificent a sinner,” said he. I did not answer him, and he rode on beside me in silence some little way. “Ah, well,” he sighed at last. “Your course has been a brief one, but very eventful. And who would have suspected so very fierce a wolf under so sheepish an outside? Body of God! You fooled us all, you and that white-faced trull.” He said it through his teeth with such a concentration of rage in his tones that it was easy to guess where the sore rankled. I looked at him gravely. “Does it become you, sir, do you think, to gird at one who is your prisoner?” “And did you not gird at me when it was your turn?” he flashed back fiercely. “Did not you and she laugh together over that poor, fond fool Cosimo whose money she took so very freely, and yet who seems to have been the only one excluded from her favours?” “You lie, you dog!” I blazed at him, so fiercely that the men turned in their saddles. He paled, and half raised the gauntleted hand in which he carried his whip. But he controlled himself, and barked an order to his followers: “Ride on, there!” When they had drawn off a little, and we were alone again, “I do not lie, sir,” he said. “It is a practice which I leave to shavelings of all degrees.” “If you say that she took aught from you, then you lie,” I repeated. He considered me steadily. “Fool!” he said at last. “Whence else came her jewels and fine clothes? From Fifanti, do you think--that impecunious pedant? Or perhaps you imagine that it was from Gambara? In time that grasping prelate might have made the Duke pay. But pay, himself? By the Blood of God! he was never known to pay for anything. “Or, yet again, do you suppose her finery was afforded her by Caro?--Messer Annibale Caro--who is so much in debt that he is never like to return to Piacenza, unless some dolt of a patron rewards him for his poetaster's labours. “No, no, my shaveling. It was I who paid--I who was the fool. God! I more than suspected the others. But you. You saint... You!”