He passed his hand gingerly over the scroll-work on the left side of the frame.

Presently he found what he wanted, and pressed.

The bottom half of the rich carving opened like a narrow drawer.

Festini watched him, motionless, as he took a bundle of papers from the secret recess behind the hinge moulding.

Tillizini examined them briefly at the window and placed them carefully in the inside pocket of his coat. He looked at Festini long and earnestly, but before he could speak the door was opened and Simone Festini came in quickly.

He walked to his father.

“What is it?” he asked, and bent his angry brows upon the old professor.

“It is nothing, my son,” said Count Festini.

He laid his hand upon the boy’s head and smiled.

“You must go downstairs until I have finished my business with his Excellency.”

The boy hesitated.

“Why should I go?” he asked.

He scented the danger and was hard to move. He looked round from one to the other, alert, suspicious, almost cat-like.

“If anything should happen to me, Simone,” said Count Festini softly, “I beg you to believe that I have provided for you handsomely, and there is a provision which is greater than any I can offer you—the protection and the friendship, and as I hope one day, the leadership, of comrades who will serve you well. And now you must go.”

He bent down and kissed the young man on the cheek.

Simone went out, dry-eyed, but full of understanding. In the hall below he came face to face with his brother, who had returned from the Piazza.

“Come this way, Antonio,” said the boy gravely.

He walked first into the dining-room where an hour ago they had been seated together at their meal.

“Our father is under arrest, I think,” he said, still coolly, as though he were surveying a commonplace happening. “I also think I know what will happen next. Now, I ask you, which way do you go if I take up our father’s work?”

His eyes were bright with suppressed excitement; he had grown suddenly to a man in that brief consciousness of impending responsibility.

Antonio looked at him sorrowfully.

“I go the straight way, Simone,” he said quietly. “Whichever way is honest and clean and kindly, I go that way.”

“Buono!” said the other. “Then we part here unless God sends a miracle—you to your destiny and I to mine.”

He stopped and went deadly white, and looking at him, Antonio saw the beads of sweat upon his brow.

“What is the matter?” he asked, and stepped forward to his side, but the boy pushed him back.

“It is nothing,” he said, “nothing.”

He held himself stiffly erect, his beautiful face raised, his eyes fixed on the discoloured decorations of the ceiling.

For he had heard the pistol shot, muffled as it was by intervening doors and thick walls, that told the end for Count Festini.

Tillizini, hurrying down to break the news to him, found him fully prepared.

“I thank your Excellency,” said the boy. “I knew. Your Excellency will not live to see the result of your work, for you are an old man, but if you did, you will behold the revenge which I shall extract from the world for this murder, for I am very young, and, by God’s favour, I have many years to live.” Tillizini said nothing, but he went back to Florence a sad man.

Three months afterwards he again visited Siena, and in the Via Cavour, in broad daylight, he was shot down by two masked men who made good their escape; and, in his chair, at the College of Anthropology at Florence, there reigned, in good time, Tillizini the younger.

* Count Guido did not wait for the end, but departed without a stroke of his sword.

I. —SIR RALPH DELIVERS JUDGMENT

IT WAS ABSURD TO call the affair “the Red Hand Trial,” because the “Red Hand” had played no part in the case so far as the burglary was concerned.

It was a very commonplace burglary with a well-known, albeit humble member of Burboro’s community in the dock. He had been found in a house in the early hours of the morning, he had given an incoherent explanation to the alert butler who had captured him, and, beyond a rigmarole of a story that some mysterious Italian had sent him thither, there was no hint of the workings of the extraordinary association which at the moment agitated the law-abiding people of Britain.

It was equally absurd and grossly unfair to accuse the newspapers who referred to it as “the Red Hand Case,” of unjustifiable sensationalism. After all, there was an Italian mentioned in connexion with the charge—quite enough in those days of panic to justify the reference.

The Session House was crowded, for the case had excited more than usual interest. All the county was there. Lady Morte-Mannery occupied a seat on the Bench, as was her right. Most of the house-party from East Mannery had driven over and was seated in privileged places, to the no small inconvenience of the Bar and the representatives of the Press, the latter of whom bitterly and indignantly resented this encroachment upon their already restricted domain.

But Sir Ralph Morte-Mannery, the Chairman of the Session, had a short way with critics and professed, though his practice did not always come into line with his theory, that the Press might be ignored and impressed with a sense of its own unworthiness.

The Pressmen in the Session House at Burboro’ were constantly undergoing that mysterious process which is known as “being put in their place.” They desired, most earnestly, that the principle should be applied now, for their places were occupied by the guests of the Chairman.

Hilary George, K.C., sat with his colleagues, though only as a spectator. He was curious to see in operation the workings of justice, as Sir Ralph conceived it.

Sir Ralph’s sentences were notorious, his judgments had before now come up for revision. He was, perhaps, the best hated man in the country. Mothers frightened their obstreperous children with references to Sir Ralph. He was the bogey man of the poacher, a moral scarecrow to tramps, people who slept out at night, and suchlike dangerous characters.

A little man, spare and bony, his clothes, though carefully fitted, seemed to hang upon him; his face was long and white, and solemn; his lips drooped mournfully at each corner. A pair of gold-mounted pince-nez struck an angle on his pendulous nose as to suggest that they were so placed in order not to obstruct his line of vision. His hair was white and thin; he had two dirty-grey tufts of side-whisker, and affected a Gladstonian collar. His voice, when he spoke, was querulous and complaining; he gave the impression that he felt a personal resentment toward the unfortunate prisoner in the dock, for having dragged him from his comfortable library to this ill-ventilated court.

Sir Ralph was a man hovering about the age of sixty. His wife, who was looking supremely lovely in her black velvet cloak and her big black hat, which one white feather lightened, was nearly thirty years his junior. A beautiful woman by some standards. Junoesque, imperial, commanding; her lips in repose were thin and straight, and if the truth be told, a little repellent. Some people found them so. Hilary George, for one, a daring rider to hounds, and wont to employ the phraseology of the field, confessed that he never saw those lips tighten but a voice within him uttered the warning, “’Ware! ’ware!”

She was a beautiful woman, and a disappointed woman. She had married Sir Ralph Morte-Mannery, five years before, in the supreme faith that she had emerged for ever from that atmosphere of penury which had surrounded her girlhood; that she had said “good-bye” to the strivings, the scrimpings and the make-believe of shabby gentility with which a mother with social aspirations and an income of a £150 a year had enclouded her.

But Vera Forsyth found she had moved from an atmosphere of penury enforced by circumstances to an atmosphere of penury practised for love of it.