"Probably?" the prisoner repeated.
"By a goldsmith named Benvenuto Cellini."
"Twenty years ago I would have cursed the murderer: to-day I say from the bottom of my heart, 'May his murderer be blessed!' Did they give my noble lord a burial worthy of the man?"
"I think so: they built a tomb for him in the cathedral of Gaeta, and upon the tomb is an epitaph wherein it is said that, beside him who sleeps there, Alexander the Great was a sorry knave, and Cæsar an idle blackguard."
"And the other?"
"What other?"
"The woman who persecuted me?"
"Dead also: dead nine years since."
"Just so. One night, here in my cell, I saw a phantom kneeling and praying. I cried out and it disappeared. It was she asking my forgiveness."
"Do you think, then, that when death came upon her she relented?"