"Yes. God knows how truly you speak!" ejaculated Wagner, raising his head. "That girl--oh! sooner than have harmed one single hair of her head---- But how know you that it is Agnes who is murdered?" he cried abruptly, turning toward the lieutenant. "It was you who said it, signor," calmly replied the officer, as he fixed his dark eyes keenly upon Fernand. "Oh! it was a surmise--a conjecture--because I parted with Agnes a short time ago in the garden," exclaimed Wagner, speaking in hurried and broken sentences. "Behold the victim!" said the lieutenant, who had approached the window, from which he was looking. Wagner sprung from his couch, and glanced forth into the garden beneath. The sbirri were advancing along the gravel pathway, bearing amongst them the corpse of Agnes upon whose pallid countenance the morning sunbeams were dancing, as if in mockery even at death. "Holy Virgin! it is indeed Agnes!" cried Wagner, in a tone of the most profound heart-rending anguish, and he fell back senseless in the arms of the lieutenant. An hour afterward, Fernand Wagner was the inmate of a dungeon beneath the palace inhabited by the Duke of Florence. CHAPTER XVI. NISIDA AND THE CARMELITE ABBESS. Punctually at midday, the Lady Nisida of Riverola proceeded, alone and unattended, to the Convent of Carmelite Nuns, where she was immediately admitted into the presence of the abbess. The superior of this monastic establishment, was a tall, thin, stern-looking woman, with a sallow complexion, an imperious compression of the lips, and small, grey eyes, that seemed to flicker with malignity rather than to beam with the pure light of Christian love. She was noted for the austerity of her manners, the rigid discipline which she maintained in the convent, and the inexorable disposition which she showed toward those who, having committed a fault, came within her jurisdiction. Rumor was often busy with the affairs of the Carmelite Convent; and the grandams and gossips of Florence would huddle together around their domestic hearths, on the cold winter's evenings, and venture mysterious hints and whispers of strange deeds committed within the walls of that sacred institution; how from time to time some young and beautiful nun had suddenly disappeared, to the surprise and alarm of her companions; how piercing shrieks had been heard to issue from the interior of the building, by those who passed near it at night,--and how the inmates themselves were often aroused from their slumbers by strange noises resembling the rattling of chains, the working of ponderous machinery, and the revolution of huge wheels.