It was strange, very strange!

It was so strange and unaccountable that Signor Fortini felt that, unless some fresh circumstances should be brought to light beyond those which had as yet become known either to him, or to the police, it was safe to predict that the tribunal would not have the means of coming to any conclusion concerning the author of the murder.

The lawyer turned away from the gate, and strolled through the streets without any intention as to the direction in which he walked, so deeply was he pondering upon the possibilities that were brought within his mental vision by the extraordinary facts he had ascertained.

He would almost have preferred, he thought, as he pursued his way profoundly musing, that it should have been shown that one only, instead of both the persons towards whom the possibilities he had imagined, pointed, had gone at that strange hour towards the locality of the crime.

Nevertheless, as he said to himself, the more doubt, the more elements of difficulty, the better.  In truth the chance seemed to be a very good one, that it might never be known who gave that wretched girl her death.

CHAPTER VI

At the Circolo again

At the Circolo that evening there was no lack of subject for conversation, as may be easily imagined.  The rooms were very full, and every tongue was busy with the same topic.

“For my part I don’t believe that La Bianca is dead at all.  What proof have we of the fact?  Somebody has been told that somebody else heard some other pumpkin-head say so.  Report, signori miei, is an habitual liar, and I for one never believe a word she says without evidence of the truth of it,” said the Conte Luigi Spadoni, a man who was known to make a practice of reading French novels, and was therefore held to be an esprit fort and a philosopher, in accordance with which character he always professed indiscriminate disbelief in everything.

“Oh come, Spadoni, that won’t do this time.  Bah, you are the only living soul in the town that don’t believe it then.  Evidence, per Dio!  Go and ask the men at the Porta Nuova, who received the body, when the contadini brought it in,” cried a dozen voices at once.

“But Spadoni has the weakness of being so excessively credulous,” said a bald young man with gold spectacles, looking up from a game of chess he was playing in a corner.

“Who, I?  I credulous?  That is a good one!  Why I said, man alive, that I disbelieved it,” cried Spadoni, eagerly.

“I know it, and very credulous indeed it seems to me, to believe that all the people, who say they have seen the prima donna’s dead body, should be mistaken in such a fact, or conspiring without motive to declare it falsely.  I call that very credulous,” said the chess-player, quietly.

“Did you ever see such an addle-pate.  He can’t understand the difference between believing and disbelieving,” rejoined Spadoni triumphantly, and carrying the great bulk of the bystanders with him.