He broke off abruptly—so abruptly, and with such a change of voice, that Hugh Girdlestone was startled from his apathy. He looked up, and saw the surgeon staring down with a face of ashy horror at the corpse upon the bed.
"Dio!" he faltered. "What is this?"
He had laid back the collar of the nightdress and bared the beautiful white bosom beneath; and there, just above the region of the heart, like a mere speck upon a surface of pure marble, was visible a tiny puncture—a spot so small, so insignificant, that but for a pale violet discoloration spreading round it like a halo, it would perhaps have escaped observation altogether.
"What is this?" he repeated. "What does it mean?"
Hugh Girdlestone answered never a word, but stood in stony silence with his eyes fixed on the fatal spot. Then he stooped, looked into it more narrowly, shuddered, rose once again to his full height, and less with his breath than by the motion of his lips, shaped out the one word:—
"Murdered."
CHAPTER II.
It was the most mysterious crime that had been committed in Rome since the famous murder in the Coliseum about seven years before. The whole city rang with it. Even the wretched little local newspapers, the Giornale di Roma, the Diario Romano, and the Vero Amico del Popolo, made space, amid the more pressing claims of Church festivals, provincial miracles, and the reporting of homilies, to detail some few scanty particulars of the "tragedia deplorabile" in the Palazzo Bardello. Each, too, hinted its own solution to the enigma. The Diario inclined to the suicidal point of view; the Giornale, more politically wise than its contemporaries, pointed a significant finger towards Sardinia; the Vero Amico, under cover of a cloud of fine phrases, insinuated a suspicion of Hugh Girdlestone himself. At every table-d'hôte and every artist's club, at the public reading rooms, in the studios, in the cafés, and at every evening party throughout Rome, it was the universal topic.
In the meanwhile such feeble efforts as it is in the nature of a Pontifical Government to make were put forward for the discovery of the murderer. A post-mortem examination was appointed; official consultations were held; official depositions were drawn up; pompous gendarmes clanked perpetually up and down the staircase and courtyard of the Palazzo Bardello; and every one about the place who could possibly be supposed to have anything to say upon the subject was summoned to give evidence. But in vain. Days went by, weeks went by, and the mystery remained impenetrable as ever. Passing shadows of suspicion fell here and there—on Margherita, on a Corsican courier in the service of the American family, on Hugh Girdlestone; but they rested scarcely at all, and vanished away as a breath from a surface of polished steel.
In the meanwhile, Ethel Girdlestone was laid to rest in a quiet little Roman Catholic cemetery beyond the walls—a lonely, picturesque spot, overlooking the valley of the Tiber and the mountains about Fidenæ. A plain marble cross and a wreath of immortelles marked the place of her grave. For a week or two the freshly-turned mould looked drear and desolate under the Spring sunshine; but the grass soon sprang up again, and the wild crocuses struck root and blossomed over it; and by that time Rome had found some fresh subject for gossip, and the fate of Ethel Girdlestone was well nigh forgotten.