The stranger attracted no notice as he came and went amongst the market people and the fishermen; they did not observe that he was constantly watching the dark figure of Don Piero di Albano as it emerged from the vast arched ways of the palace on the Lago di Mezzo, or returned from the law courts in the mist of the frost-touched evenings. Don Piero had raised a mound of fair marble to his wife, and paid daily for masses for her soul, said in the noble church of S. Andrea, and went about amongst his fellow-citizens still in the garb of woe and with a long face, mourning for his young spouse.
But Sanctis never saw his shadow lengthen on the moss-grown stones but what he said to himself, 'this is the assassin.'
How to prove it? That was the problem which perplexed him and baffled him, and which he turned over and over in his thoughts every evening time that he walked out by the mills of the Twelve Apostles, and looked across the water to the sombre front of the great iron-bound Gothic palace, where in the summers that were gone Donna Aloysia had leaned from her casement to
