A pale-faced foreigner had haunted his steps for weeks and months, had traced all his past years almost hour by hour, had pieced together a million fragments of infinitesimal evidence, fine as dust, that thus assembled made a tale written on granite; had found out old servants, and made them speak in secrecy under their oath; and when the proof was so complete and overwhelming that no denial of or escape from it was possible, had come straight to the worthy judge of the civil court whom Mantua reverenced, and had said to him four words, only:
'You were the murderer.'
With the eye of a trained man of the law, the masked assassin knew at a glance that there was no loophole of escape for him; that this pale stranger, come he knew not whence, and working to what end he could not tell, had pulled down all his careful fabric of fraud and falsehood, and hemmed him in between two stone walls of evidence.
He confessed: seeing in that act some paltry chance of life and public pity, and wrote out his confession and signed it.
When on the morrow he was in the
