Ludovico looked at the lawyer, and the lawyer looked at Ludovico; but neither of them could suggest anything in explanation of so strange a circumstance.

“I saw nothing of any such person either in the Pineta or on the road,” said Ludovico.  “Who could it have been?”

The old lawyer only shrugged his shoulders in reply

“There is a young lady,” resumed Ludovico, after some minutes of thought, “a friend of mine—­a young artist engaged in making copies from the mosaics in our churches.  I know that it was her purpose shortly to begin some work of this kind at St. Apollinare in Classe.  It may be that she had selected this morning for the purpose of going out to look at her task,—­though I almost think that I should have been informed of her intention.”

“The plot seems to thicken with a vengeance,” said the lawyer, with an impatient shrug, and a slight sneer of ill-humour, provoked by the multiplicity of his young client’s lady friends.  “I daresay,” he added, “the young ladies are not playing hide-and-seek in the Pineta all by themselves.”

“But what had I better do?” said the young Marchese, looking with increased anxiety into the lawyer’s face; “the fact is—­you see, Signor Giovacchino, this new idea, this possibility that Paolina—­ that is the young artist’s name—­may be—­may have been in the forest—­in short, I feel more uneasy than before till I can learn what has become of both of them.”

“Do you mean,” said the lawyer, with a sneer in his voice, but at the same time looking into his companion’s face with a shrewd expression of investigation in his eye,—­“do you mean that the two ladies may possibly have fallen in with each other, and may in such case not improbably have fallen out with each other?  You know best, Signor Marchese, the likelihood of any trouble arising out of such a meeting.”

“For God’s sake don’t speak in such a tone, Signor Giovacchino.  I tell you I am seriously uneasy.  Should they have met under such circumstances—­God only knows—­What would you advise me to do, Signor Giovacchino?” said the Marchese, looking into the lawyer’s face with increasing and now evidently painful anxiety.

“It is ill giving advice without knowing all the circumstances of a case, Signor Marchese,” returned Fortini, somewhat drily, looking hard at the young man as he spoke, and putting a meaning emphasis on the word “all.”

“You do know all the circumstances as far as I know them myself.  The thing happened exactly as I told you,” replied Ludovico.

“You left her sleeping on a bank in the forest, and have never seen her since?” said the lawyer, thoughtfully.

“Exactly so!  I returned to the spot where I had left her—­at least as far as I could tell it was the same spot—­and she was no longer there,” replied Ludovico.

“But you were not sure that you did return to the same spot?  You could not recognise it again with certainty?”