thought that their wings were so ruddy of hue because they had been dipped in her own heart's blood, and she grew fainter and fainter the further they flew, and when they were lost to sight in the gold haze of the sun, then her life went from her and she sank down and died.
In Mantua that night, an old man sat writing in an ancient house looking on the Lago di Mezzo, and having its foundations sunk deep down amongst the reeds and osiers and the shifting sands. There was no sound but such as came from the hoarse chorus of the frogs that thronged the lake, and now and then a bittern's call or an owl's hoot. In the city, now dark with the gloom of a moonless midnight, the white marble of a mausoleum, with a lamp burning ever before it, was shut away behind the stately doors of the noble church of S. Andrea; and that tomb, with its guardian angels, was raised to the memory of his wife, who had died young whilst he was old. What he wrote now at the leather-covered table, by the light of oil wicks burning feebly, was his own confession that he had killed her with a dagger which her lover had left in her chamber in carnival time.
