Both parties adopted the suggestion readily, and returned to their work apparently satisfied.
An hour and a half after, while Avanzi was sitting at his frame, with his face to the wall, Simonetti entered the room with an axe he had picked up in the carpenter's store, and walking deliberately up to Avanzi, struck him with the axe across the neck, as he was stooping down.

Almost immediate death ensued, and on the arrival of the guard, Simonetti was arrested at once, and placed in irons.

Probably, as a matter of policy, so daring a crime required summary punishment; at any rate, Papal justice seems to have been executed with unexampled promptitude.

With what the report justly calls "laudable celerity," the case was got ready for trial in a week, and on the 30th of July, the civil and criminal court of Civita Vecchia met to try the prisoner.

There could be no conceivable question about the case.