But the days and the weeks and the months went by, and she never came back to Santa Tarsilla.
One night Santa Tarsilla, which never hardly heard any news at all (the only news-sheet in the place being the priest's copy of the Voce della Verità), was a little stirred out of its feeble, feverish drowsiness by hearing that the escaped galley-slave Saturnino Mastarna had been captured afresh: taken by the carabineers after a fierce fight, having been discovered as he was hiding in a wine-shop in the hamlet of Saturnia, whose owner, a widow woman, had gone into Orbetello to sell some Etruscan ornaments and an Etruscan crown of oak leaves to a goldsmith.
The woman's poverty, and her halting story to the goldsmith, had roused the suspicions of the police, and the carabineers, entering her house by force, had shot down Saturnino through the keyhole of a door, and had seized him, after being crushed by his arms and rent with his teeth where he lay shot on the ground, as though he were a beast of prey they were driving out of its lair.
Wounded and disabled, but not so greatly as to be thought in peril of his life, the
