After a moment he roused himself with an effort and said, "And this is the end! How absurd! They'll find me here in any case, and what a chatter there'll be! The Chamber—the journals—all the scribblers and speechifiers. What will Europe say? Another Boulanger, perhaps! But I'm sorry for Italy. Nobody can say I did not love my country. Where her interest lay I let nothing interfere. And just when everything seemed to triumph...."
He attempted to laugh. Roma shuddered.
"It was the star of the Annunziata that did it. The man threw it with such force. To think that it's been the aim of my life to win that Order and now it kills me! Ridiculous, isn't it?"
"There's a side of justice in that, though, and I'm not going to whine. The Pope tried to paint an awful end, but his nightmare didn't frighten me. We must all bow our heads to the law of compensation—the Pope as well as everybody else. But to die stupidly like this..."
He was speaking with difficulty, and dragging at his shirt front. Roma opened it at the neck, and something dropped on to the floor. It was a lock of glossy black hair tied with a red ribbon such as lawyers used to bind documents together. Dull as his sight was, he saw it.
"Yours, Roma! You were ill with fever when you first came to Rome, you remember. The doctors cut off your beautiful hair. This was some of it. I've worn it ever since. Silly, wasn't it?"
Tears began to shine in Roma's eyes. The cynical man who laughed at sentiment had carried the tenderest badge of it in his breast.
"I used to wear some of my mother's in the same place when I was younger. She was a good woman, too. When she put me to bed she used to repeat something: 'Hold Thou my hands,' I think.... May I hold your hands, Roma?"
Roma turned away her head, but she held out her hand, and the dying man kissed it.