Martini held his tongue and bit
his moustache. After all these years he had betrayed
himself like a schoolboy--and she had not
even noticed it!
"The Cathedral bell is tolling," she said after
a little while, looking round with recovered self-command.
"Someone must be dead."
"That is what I came to show you," Martini
answered in his everyday voice. He picked up the
placard from the floor and handed it to her.
Hastily printed in large type was a black-bordered
announcement that: "Our dearly beloved Bishop,
His Eminence the Cardinal, Monsignor Lorenzo
Montanelli," had died suddenly at Ravenna, "from
the rupture of an aneurism of the heart."
She glanced up quickly from the paper, and
Martini answered the unspoken suggestion in her
eyes with a shrug of his shoulders.
"What would you have, Madonna? Aneurism
is as good a word as any other."
End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Gadfly, by E. L. Voynich
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