"
"What do you mean? I! Signor Fortini. What strange notion is
misleading you? I don't know what you mean!" cried the Marchese,
while a look of horror gradually crept over his face.
"When the body of the murdered woman was brought into the city,--
when we two stood in the gateway, and when your hand raised the
sheet that covered the face of the dead, you exclaimed aloud
`Paolina!' What was then the thought that was in your mind? I
imagined, at the time, that you recognized her in the dead woman
before you. A very few minutes, however, sufficed to show that it
was not Paolina, but Bianca who lay there murdered. And then, amid
the horror of the first idea of your guilt, which the nature of the
circumstances rendered inevitable, I thought no more of the
exclamation you had uttered. But I have not forgotten the fact. You
did, on seeing Bianca dead before you, exclaim, `Good God! Paolina!'
What was the thought in your mind, Signor Marchese, that prompted
that exclamation? What but the sudden spontaneous rush of the
conviction that it was she who had done the deed on which you were
looking?"
For a few moments the Marchese seemed too much stunned by the
inference, and the appeal of the lawyer, and by the vision of the
consequences, which he purposed drawing from it, to utter any reply
to the demand which had been made on him.
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