"If that murder was not committed by Paolina
Foscarelli, I will give you or anybody else leave to call me a
blockhead."
And therewith Signor Fortini and his companion drove under the old
archway of the Porta Nuova and entered the city.
BOOK VI
Poena Pede Claudo
CHAPTER I
Signor Fortini receives the Signora Steno in his Studio
It was the end of the first week in Lent; and all Ravenna was still
busily engaged in talking, thinking, and speculating on the
mysterious crime that had been committed on Ash Wednesday morning in
the Pineta. The excitement on the subject, indeed, was greater now
than it had been immediately after the event. For, by this time,
everybody in Ravenna knew all that anybody knew on the subject; the
manner, time, and place of the murder, and the different competing
theories which had been started to account for it, and with the
conflicting probabilities of which the judicial authorities were
known to be occupying themselves.
These, as the reader knows, were three; based, in each case, on the
fact that the suspected person was known, or was supposed to be
known, to have been at, or near, to the spot where the crime was
committed at the time when it had been committed.
The Marchese Ludovico was indisputably known; on his own confession,
to have been in the immediate neighbourhood of the spot at the time
when the murder must have been done.
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