But what if such a supposition were simply inconsistent with the known facts?  What if it were simply impossible that any person should inflict on themselves such an injury as that which it was evident the murdered woman had sustained; and more impossible still that they should have been able to adopt the means for concealing the wound which the assassin had adopted?  What if such was the perfectly unhesitating judgment and declaration of the medical authorities?  Such people as Orsola Steno, and those who shared her opinion, are ordinarily impervious to any such reasoning.  It is remarkable that, in any case of doubt or circumstances of suspicion, the popular mind—­or, at all events, the Italian popular mind—­is specially disposed to mistrust the medical profession.  They suspect error exactly where scientific certainty is the most perfect, and deception precisely in those who have the least possible imaginable motive for deceiving.  Probably it may be because the grounds and means of the knowledge they mistrust are more wholly, than in any other case, beyond the sphere of their own conceptions.

When old Orsola Steno was told that the doctors declared that it was not within the bounds of possibility that La Bianca should have put herself to death in the manner in which she had been put to death, nothing could exceed the profundity of the contempt with which she sneered in reply: 

“Ah! they’ll say anything to make out that they know more than other folks, and, maybe, they often know a deal less.  Don’t tell me.  How should they know what a woman will do when she is driven?  I know what women are, and I know what them doctors are; and you may believe that an old woman, who has been a young one, knows more what such an one as that Bianca can do, when she has no hope before her, than all the doctors.”

“But it is impossible—­physically impossible that she could have done it.”

“Ta, ta, ta, ta!  Physic, indeed; what’s physic got to do with it?  I should like to physic them that try to throw suspicion on a poor innocent girl all to make out their own cleverness.”

So Signora Orsola victoriously, and to the great increase of her confidence in her own powers of insight, continued to hold her own opinion, and it was shared by many other similarly-constituted minds.

The old Venetian woman had lived a very, quiet life in the strange city to which fate had brought her, making but few acquaintances, and holding but little intercourse with those few; but now, under the terrible misfortune which had happened, she was stirred up to activity in every way in which activity was possible to her.  She went to the Palazzo Castelmare and endeavoured to see the Marchese Lamberto in vain.  She was told that the Marchese was ill, and could not see any one.