CHAPTER II

Was it Paolina after all?

Orsola Steno quitted the lawyer’s studio as entirely contented with the result of her interview as she left him.  She doubted not that she had fully impressed him with her own conviction as to the explanation of the mysterious circumstances of the singer’s death; that Paolina’s innocence would be readily recognized; and that her adopted daughter would shortly be restored to her in the Via di Sta.  Eufemia.

The lawyer remained for some time seated in his chair in deep thought after his visitor had left him.

Suddenly he let his open hand fall heavily with a loud clap on the table before him, disturbing the papers on it from their places, and causing the fine blue sand, which stood in an open wooden basin for the purpose of doing the office of blotting-paper, to be spilled in all directions by the concussion, and said aloud, “By God!  That girl has done it!”

“Ah, talk of the passions of men,” he went on, in a lower muttering voice, after some further moments of meditation; “they are nothing—­ they are child’s play compared to the blind animal-like impulses that force a woman’s will into their service when any of the master passions of the sex are touched.  A woman’s jealousy; it is as plain as the sun at noonday.  And we are puzzling our brains looking on this side and on that, to find a possible explanation of the facts.  Talk of a tigress and her whelps!  There’s a young girl who looks as innocent as a St. Agnes, and speaks as if butter would not melt in her mouth.  Take—­threaten to take—­her lover from her, and she turns upon you like a scorpion at bay.  Furens quid foemina possit.  Ay indeed.  And they are all alike.  That old woman there; why she was ready, with all her ‘Ave Marias’ and ‘Ora pro nobis,’ to kill the woman again if she were not killed already, out of pure sympathy with the wrong done to her adopted daughter.  I don’t think there is a doubt about it.  I should like to wager a hundred to one that the Venetian girl put her rival to death.  The story is neither a new nor a strange one.”

“Whether the commission of the deed can be brought home to her,” he continued, after another period of musing, “that is another question; and one with which, however interesting it may be to my good friend Pietro Logarini, we need not trouble ourselves.  And after all, what a good thing it is that things should have fallen out as they have.  That old fool of a Marchese!  It is a lesson to believe in nothing and no man, when one thinks of it.  The death of that woman is the saving of the name.  But, per Bacco!  I must not say so too loudly,” thought the old lawyer to himself, with a grim smile, “or I shall be doing just what the old fool of a woman has been doing.  Yes, that was the last link in the chain of the evidence we wanted.  She was on the spot at the time—­the death-dealing weapon was essentially a woman’s weapon, and the murdered woman was her feared and hated rival—­and now we have direct evidence that she felt her to be such.  If the judges can find any other hypothesis supported by stronger circumstantial evidence than this—­why, I think that I had better go to school again.”