And we are puzzling our brains looking on
this side and on that, to find a possible explanation of the facts.
Talk of a tigress and her whelps! There's a young girl who looks as
innocent as a St. Agnes, and speaks as if butter would not melt in
her mouth. Take--threaten to take--her lover from her, and she turns
upon you like a scorpion at bay. Furens quid foemina possit. Ay
indeed. And they are all alike. That old woman there; why she was
ready, with all her 'Ave Marias' and 'Ora pro nobis,' to kill the
woman again if she were not killed already, out of pure sympathy
with the wrong done to her adopted daughter. I don't think there is
a doubt about it. I should like to wager a hundred to one that the
Venetian girl put her rival to death. The story is neither a new nor
a strange one."
"Whether the commission of the deed can be brought home to her," he
continued, after another period of musing, "that is another
question; and one with which, however interesting it may be to my
good friend Pietro Logarini, we need not trouble ourselves. And
after all, what a good thing it is that things should have fallen
out as they have. That old fool of a Marchese! It is a lesson to
believe in nothing and no man, when one thinks of it. The death of
that woman is the saving of the name. But, per Bacco! I must not say
so too loudly," thought the old lawyer to himself, with a grim
smile, "or I shall be doing just what the old fool of a woman has
been doing.
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