"
"No, you don't mean it? the noxious animal!" exclaimed Ludovico,
with intense disgust.
"It seems that he overheard you and the singer make your appointment
for the excursion, and that, moved by curiosity and the hope of
making mischief, he determined to be beforehand with you on the
road, and picking up, if he could, the means of paying off both the
lady and yourself for some of the mortification your ridicule had
caused him," said the lawyer.
"I could not have believed it possible; the mean-spirited spiteful
wretch! I did not think he had it in him!" said Ludovico.
"A man is apt to be spiteful towards those who cause him to suffer
greatly. And there is no suffering greater to a man as vain as the
Conte Leandro than the mortification of his vanity. But his
spitefulness has been punished: first, by a couple of days'
imprisonment, and a fright which half killed him; and secondly, by
the sort of reception which you may suppose awaited him when he was
released as the result of his explanation. I think he has had his
due," added the lawyer, grimly.
"But how does his explanation exclude the possibility that he may
have been the assassin after all? Why may not the same mortified
vanity that incited him to play the spy, have moved him to take
deadly vengeance on the woman he hated so bitterly? The man who was
capable of the one is likely enough to be capable of the other.
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