Were there any persons in the city who might be supposed to feel enmity or ill-will towards the singer?  Many a one of the young nobles had, doubtless, been kept at arms’ length by Bianca in a manner that might easily be supposed to breed hatred in a vain and ill-conditioned heart.  But murder—­and such a murder!  It was difficult to suppose that such a cause should be sufficient to produce such an effect; yet vanity is a very strong and a very evil-counselling passion.

Vanity?  Ha! could it be?  Surely there never was so absurdly, so grossly, vain a creature, as that Conte Leandro?  And the poor murdered Diva had quizzed, and snubbed, and mortified him again and again.  The lawyer had heard that much; and Leandro was aware of the fact that Bianca was to be in the Pineta at that time.  So much was clear from what the Marchese had said.  But she was to be there with Ludovico—­how could the poet expect to find her alone?  Could it be that he had followed them merely for the sake of making mischief and rendering himself disagreeable, and had chanced to come upon her asleep and alone?  Could this be the clue?

But it would surely be easy to ascertain to a certainty whether the Conte Leandro had left the city that morning or not.  If only it could be shown that he had done so?  The amount of probability that he had really been the perpetrator of the crime, or the possibility of convicting him of it, would signify comparatively little.  It would be sufficient if only a competing theory, based on a possibility, could be set up; if only such an alternative possibility could be presented to the minds of the judges as should justify them in feeling that the matter was too doubtful to warrant a conviction.

Then, suddenly, as he thought on all the causes of hatred that Bianca might be supposed to have inspired, his mind reverted to those words which Signor Pietro Logarini, the head of the police, had let drop when speaking of the Signorina Paolina Foscarelli:—­ “Women, who are fond of a man, don’t like to see him with another woman, and a beautiful one, under the circumstances in which the Marchese might have been seen with Bianca.”

That was the sense of the remark to which the Commissary had partially given utterance; and now the lawyer thought of it.  He was tempted to believe that Logarini had been struck by the same idea that had before flashed into his mind almost with the force of a revelation.

Might it not have been the hand of the Venetian girl, maddened by jealousy, which had taken the life of her rival, while she slept?

Such a story would by no means be now told for the first time.  Very far from it.  Men had not now to learn furens quid foemina possit.

Paolina was known to have left the city at that suspiciously strange hour of the morning.  She was known to have been, at all events, at no very great distance from the spot where the crime was committed.