But I will tell you what I can do.

We will send one of these fellows to my house to order my servant to come here with my calessino as quick as he can; and if these men are the people we want--What are they doing?
They are carrying something! Why surely--Signor Marchese!" said the old lawyer, looking into his companion's face, while a strange expression of understanding, mixed with a blank look of dismay and alarm, stole over his own features.
"What is it ?--What have they got ?--Why, heavens and earth! it is--Signor Fortini, is it not a dead body they are carrying?
My God!" The young man griped his companion's arm hard, as he spoke, and the action enabled the lawyer to remark that he was shaking all over.
In another minute the men whom they had seen coming along the road were close to the gate.

They were six in number; and they were bearing--somewhat, between them.

They advanced beneath the covered gateway, and there, as it is necessary to do in the case of everything brought into the town, they set their burthen down on the flag-stones, at the feet of the officers of the gate, and of the Marchese and the lawyer.
Their burthen was a door lifted from its hinges, and supported by three slender stakes drawn green from a hedgerow.

And on the door there lay, covered with a sheet, what was evidently a dead body.
Ludovico, with his eyes starting from his head, and horror in every feature of his face, still clutching one hand of the old lawyer in his, stretched forward with one advanced stride towards the extemporized bier, and with his other hand lifted the sheet.
A shriek of horror burst from him.