Then, suddenly, as he thought on all the causes of hatred that
Bianca might be supposed to have inspired, his mind reverted to
those words which Signor Pietro Logarini, the head of the police,
had let drop when speaking of the Signorina Paolina Foscarelli:--
"Women, who are fond of a man, don't like to see him with another
woman, and a beautiful one, under the circumstances in which the
Marchese might have been seen with Bianca."
That was the sense of the remark to which the Commissary had
partially given utterance; and now the lawyer thought of it. He was
tempted to believe that Logarini had been struck by the same idea
that had before flashed into his mind almost with the force of a
revelation.
Might it not have been the hand of the Venetian girl, maddened by
jealousy, which had taken the life of her rival, while she slept?
Such a story would by no means be now told for the first time. Very
far from it. Men had not now to learn furens quid foemina possit.
Paolina was known to have left the city at that suspiciously strange
hour of the morning. She was known to have been, at all events, at
no very great distance from the spot where the crime was committed.
And was it not possible that, on the theory of Ludovico's innocence,
the true explanation of the exclamation, which had escaped from him
at the city gate, was to be found in supposing that he, too, had
been struck by a similar thought? Might not that outcry on Paolina,
uttered when the speaker knew well that it was Bianca and not
Paolina that lay dead before him, have been forced from him by the
sudden thought that she had done the deed then revealed to him?
For the first time the shrewd lawyer began to feel a real doubt as
to the author of the crime, It might be that the Marchesino was
innocent after all, that his account of the events of that morning,
as far as he was concerned, was simply true.
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