Precedents were hunted up, and many a story told of women who had done equally desperate deeds under similar provocation.

“I feel very little doubt of it, myself,” said Manutoli; “there is nothing improbable in such a solution, while it is in the highest degree improbable that Ludovico should have raised his hand against a sleeping woman, enticed by him in the forest for the purpose.  Bah!  It is monstrous.”

“He would have been more to be pitied than blamed if he had done it,” said another of the young men, who did not bear himself a reputation of the most brilliant sort; “if I had a rich uncle I swear by all the saints, that I would not let the prettiest woman that ever made a fool of a man, come between me an my inheritance.”

“Ludovico was not the man to have done it any way.  Besides, the mischief had not been done; it was only a project talked of.  There might have been a hundred ways of breaking off so absurd a match.  It would have been time to have recourse to les grands moyens, when the thing had been done, and all else had failed.  To my notion jealousy has done it.”

“So say I. Two to one I bet that it turns out that the Venetian girl has done the trick.”

“But have you heard, all of you, that there is a third horse in the field?” said the Marchese Faraoni whose palazzo was close to the house in which the Conte Leandro lived; “there is another candidate for the galleys.  Has nobody heard that our poet was arrested before he was out of bed this morning?”

“What!  Leandro?”

“The Conte Lombardoni?”

“No!”

“You don’t mean that?”

“What, arrested for this murder of La Bianca?”

“Impossible!”

“But quite true, nevertheless.  Anybody can easily assure themselves of the fact by walking as far as the Palazzo del Governo.”

“Leandro arrested on suspicion of murder?  Well, I think the tragedy is passing into a farce.”

“It will be fatal to Leandro.  He will die of fright, if no other evil happens to him.”

“Think of the cantos of verse he will make on it.”

“He will die singing, like a swan.”

“But do you know anything about it, Faraoni?  Have you any idea how he has come to be implicated in the matter?”

“I learnt at his own lodging that he did not come home to bed the night of the ball, but was absent from home at the time the murder must have been committed.  And then I was told that the men at the Porta Nuova had declared that they had seen him pass out of the city going in the direction of the Pineta at a very early hour that morning.”

“Per Bacco! it is very strange.  What, in the name of all the saints, could he be doing out there at that time, when all honest folks were in their beds?”

“Remember all the snubbing he has had from the poor Diva all through carnival.  By Jove! it looks very queer.”

“Do you remember how he turned all sorts of colours here last night, when we were talking of it?”