It was all over in an instant—the sound—the plunging of the frightened horses. He saw the white plume of the King pass by unscathed, and Gasparo Balbi, who was riding nearest him, throw up his arms and fall backward, quietly, into the rising cloud of dust.
A great cry broke from the people all about him—it rang in his ears—it sounded far away like the beating of a furious tide upon the distant, distant shore. A blackness, a horrible blackness which he could feel, passed over his face like a cloud. And then he knew nothing more.
*****
Some quarter of an hour later one of the two guardie who were helping to lift his insensible body into a street cab looked compassionately down at Dino's clenched hands and pallid death-like face.
''Tis no wonder the poor giovane fainted,' he said sympathetically, addressing the little crowd about him. ''Tis no wonder he fainted. Perdio! as it so happens I was looking straight at him,—he was not ten paces away from the villain who fired the shot.'
CHAPTER XII.
VESTIGIA NULLA RETRORSUM.
One cloudless April morning, some three weeks later, the warm bright sunshine was making a pleasant difference even to the prisoners who were taking their usual hour of exercise between the four high walls of the paved courtyard at the Carcere Nuove. But there was one among them, a middle-aged man with gray hair and a curiously piercing look in his heavy-lidded eyes, who seemed to be expecting something beside the blue sky and the soft air of this balmy morning. And presently that something came.
The other prisoners looked after him rather enviously as he left the court in answer to the turnkey's imperative summons. Apparently he had been sent for to speak to a friend; they grumbled a little between themselves at this sign of the governor's favour.