“Well, yes.  Considering the nature of the information she gave you this morning, and bearing in mind that her existence in the flesh promises to be the means of leaving you without the price of a crust of bread in the world, and the further fact she was last seen starting on a tete-a-tete expedition with you at six o’clock in the morning, I admit that it is desirable that you should find her,” said the lawyer, with somewhat grim pleasantry.

“For heaven’s sake, Signor Giovacchino, don’t talk in that sort of way, even in jest,” replied the young man, looking round at the lawyer with an uneasy eye.  “After all, nothing can have happened to her, you know, worse than losing herself in the Pineta.”

“Pooh! happen to her.  What should happen to her?  Either you did not go back to the place where you left her; or, likely enough, after strolling a little away from it, and not finding you, she sat down, and two to one, fell asleep again.  I would wager that she is, at this moment, fast asleep under the shadow of a pine-tree, making up for last night.”

“But what had I better do?  If she is still either sleeping or waking in the forest, I must find her.”

“Let us just step as far as the gate, and make some inquiry there.  If she returned to the city she must have come to the Porta Nuova.  And she could hardly have entered the town without drawing the attention of the men at the gate.  Just let us make inquiry there in the first place.”

So they went together to the Porta Nuova, and nothing more was said between them during the short walk.  But it seemed as if the manifest uneasiness of Ludovico had infected his companion.  Yet it was evident that thoughts of a different nature were busy in their minds.  The Marchese Ludovico pressed on faster than the old lawyer could keep up with him, and was very unmistakably anxious about the object of his quest, and the tidings which he should be able to hear at the gate.

Signor Fortini had apparently got some other and newly-conceived thought in his mind.  He looked two or three times shrewdly and furtively into the face of the young Marchese; and closely compressed his thin lips together, and drew into a knot the shaggy eye-brows over his clear and thoughtful eyes.  Some notion had been suggested to his mind which very plainly he did not like.

At the gate nothing had been seen of the object of their search.  The octroi officers perfectly well remembered seeing the Marchese Ludovico, who was well known to them by sight, drive through the gate very early that morning in a bagarino with a lady.  One man had recognised the lady as the prima donna at the opera.  And they were very sure that she had not returned to the city since, at least by that gate.

But one of the officers volunteered the information that another young lady had that morning passed out of the city on foot a little before the time at which the bagarino had passed with the Marchese and the prima donna.  And the men, after some consultation together, were sure that neither had that young lady returned by the gate they guarded.