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.
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