It was Dino de Rossi who was waiting for Valdez in that small high-walled cell. The two men had not met since the morning of the attempted assassination; they grasped hands and looked into one another's face with an emotion which lay too deep for mere speech.
Presently the older man's mouth relaxed into a faint smile. 'Well, lad. So you have come to see me. You are looking better. They told me you were very ill, and I've been anxious about you,' he said simply.
'I came to you as soon as I could get up,' Dino answered, in a voice that was broken with repressed feeling. He looked about him, at the prison bed, the grated window, the bare stone walls. 'You've put yourself here,—here, in my place, Valdez. Valdez, it nearly drives me mad to remember it. I'd give half my life if I could change places with you to-day.'
'Nay, my lad, there's nothing the matter with the place. It's comfortable enough; and it's of my own choosing. Come, come, my Dino; you're weak still with the fever; sit down, lad, sit down.'
They sat down side by side on the narrow straw pallet. Then Valdez added cheerfully, 'And there's better news still of your friend Gasparo this morning. I'm glad of that. I bore the young man no malice; I'm glad to think he's likely to get over it, after all.'
'Valdez, I never could understand that part of it; they said at the trial you wanted to shoot him purposely. They said you had had some quarrel with him?'
'Ay, lad. There was no denying we had had words together; and that fat old fool, Sor Giovanni, whom they got up from Leghorn as a witness,—he was willing to swear till he was black in the face that he had heard me threaten to murder the young Marchese.' He lowered his voice and added, 'I'd had my directions beforehand—from them—up at the committee there, what to say in case the attempt on the King proved a failure. I know the best thing I can do for them is to hold my tongue. If the judges chose to shut their eyes to what's staring them in the face, it's not my duty to correct their blunders. But they wanted to hush it up, lad; they did not want to make it into a political scandal, with those elections coming on.'
He was silent again. Then he turned and laid his hand affectionately, in the old way, on Dino's shoulder.
'How are they all at Leghorn, boy?'
'All well. I had a letter from my mother this morning.'