"
"Ludovico was not the man to have done it any way. Besides, the
mischief had not been done; it was only a project talked of. There
might have been a hundred ways of breaking off so absurd a match. It
would have been time to have recourse to les grands moyens, when the
thing had been done, and all else had failed. To my notion jealousy
has done it."
"So say I. Two to one I bet that it turns out that the Venetian girl
has done the trick."
"But have you heard, all of you, that there is a third horse in the
field?" said the Marchese Faraoni whose palazzo was close to the
house in which the Conte Leandro lived; "there is another candidate
for the galleys. Has nobody heard that our poet was arrested before
he was out of bed this morning?"
"What! Leandro?"
"The Conte Lombardoni?"
"No!"
"You don't mean that?"
"What, arrested for this murder of La Bianca?"
"Impossible!"
"But quite true, nevertheless. Anybody can easily assure themselves
of the fact by walking as far as the Palazzo del Governo."
"Leandro arrested on suspicion of murder? Well, I think the tragedy
is passing into a farce."
"It will be fatal to Leandro. He will die of fright, if no other
evil happens to him."
"Think of the cantos of verse he will make on it."
"He will die singing, like a swan."
"But do you know anything about it, Faraoni? Have you any idea how
he has come to be implicated in the matter?"
"I learnt at his own lodging that he did not come home to bed the
night of the ball, but was absent from home at the time the murder
must have been committed.
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