“My notion is that it just did slip out, as you say.  An old hand, a man accustomed to be at odds with the laws and the police, would have known better.  Did he make the same statement here?” asked Fortini, rather surprised.

“On my asking him, as I felt compelled to do, what special conversation had passed between him and the girl that morning, he told me the fact,” replied the Commissary.

“But what led you to ask him such a question?” said Fortini.

“Ah!—­something that had reached my ears.  We are forced, you know, Signor Giovacchino, to have very long ears in our business.  His conversation with you to-day was held in the street,—­a bad place for such talk, Signor Giovacchino.”

“And not chosen by me for such a purpose, as you may imagine.  Little could I guess what sort of confidence I was about to hear.”

“Not that it makes any difference.  All that would have had to come out, you know, Signor Giovacchino.”

“Oh, quite so, quite so; no, no difference in the world.  Did he come to you immediately on leaving me?”

“No; it would have been better upon the whole if he had done so.  He went first, it seems, to the residence of a lady, one Signorina Paolina Foscarelli, being very desirous, he said, of not leaving her to hear of the business from other lips than his own.  It is a pity, because his abstaining from flight might have been something in his favour, if he had not made it appear, that his remaining in the city might have been caused by his desire to see again this Paolina.  Do you know anything about her?  I see by our books that she came here last autumn from Venice.  What is she like?”

“It so happens that I never saw her.  But I am told that she is pretty—­very pretty—­remarkably so.”  “Ah—­h—­h! that’s what kept the poor young fellow from running till it was too late to run.  And yet,” continued the Commissary, pausing on his words, and tapping his forehead with his finger as if a new idea had just occurred to him—­“and yet the young Don Juan goes out tete-a-tete into the forest with this other girl.”

“Che volete?” returned the lawyer with a shrug.  “Boys will be boys, and women—­are women.”

“Yes; but the women sometimes don’t quite like—­” and the Commissary allowed the remainder of his sentence to remain unspoken, being apparently too much occupied with his thoughts to speak it.

“I suppose the medical report can hardly have been made yet?” asked the lawyer, on whom the suppressed meaning of the Police Commissary’s broken sentence was not lost.

“No; there has not been time.  It was too late in the afternoon.  Professor Tomasarchi will make a post-mortem examination the first thing to-morrow morning; and I daresay we shall have his report in the course of the day, if, as is most likely, there is nothing to call for more than a superficial examination.”