Their burthen was a door lifted from its hinges, and supported by three slender stakes drawn green from a hedgerow.  And on the door there lay, covered with a sheet, what was evidently a dead body.

Ludovico, with his eyes starting from his head, and horror in every feature of his face, still clutching one hand of the old lawyer in his, stretched forward with one advanced stride towards the extemporized bier, and with his other hand lifted the sheet.

A shriek of horror burst from him.  “Ah!  Paolina mia!” he cried aloud; and then with a deep groan, as of one in physical pain, he fell into Signor Fortini’s arms, and sunk in an insensible state of sick faintness on the flag-stone pavement beneath the old gateway.

BOOK II

Four Months before that Ash Wednesday Morning

CHAPTER I

How the good News came to Ravenna

Such were the events of that last night of carnival, and of the Ash Wednesday that followed it;—­an Ash Wednesday remembered many a year afterwards in Ravenna.

The old lawyer, Fortini, standing a pace behind the Marchese Ludovico, when the latter lifted up the sheet from the face of the dead, saw only that it was the face of a woman.  Paolina Foscarelli he had never seen; and Bianca Lalli he had seen only once or twice on the stage; the lawyer not being much of a frequenter of the theatre.  There could be little doubt that the body lying there beneath the gateway, with the officials standing with awe-stricken faces around it, together with the six peasants who had brought it thither, was that of one or other of those two young women.

Of course there were plenty of persons at hand who were able to set at rest all doubt as to the identity of the murdered woman,—­for such it was pretty clear she must be considered to be.  And of course all interests in the little provincial city were for many days to come absorbed in the terrible interest belonging to the investigation of the foul deed which had been done.

But in order to set before the reader the whole of this strange story intelligibly, and to give him the same means of estimating the probabilities of the questions involved in it, and of reaching a solution of the mysterious circumstances which the authorities, who were called upon to investigate them, were in possession of, it will be expedient to go back to a period some four months previous to that memorable Ash Wednesday.

It was a bitterly cold night in Ravenna, towards the latter end of November, some four months before that Ash Wednesday on which the events that have been narrated occurred.  Untravelled English people, who have heard much of “the sweet south,” of the sunny skies of Italy, and of its balmy atmosphere, do not readily imagine that such cold is ever to be found in that favoured clime.  But the fact is that cold several degrees below the freezing point is by no means rare in the sub-Alpine and sub-Apennine districts of northern Italy.