On the way thither he murmured to himself, "Horrible!— horrible!"—and both the letter and a newspaper which had been enclosed in it shook in his hands.
He had half an hour to wait before the advent of the evening train for Venice, and he spent it in a quiet corner poring over the newspaper. And not that newspaper only, for he presently became aware that all the small, ill-printed sheets offered him by an old newsvender in the station were full of the same news, and some with later detail—nay, that the people walking up and down in the station were eagerly talking of it.
An Englishman had been assassinated in Venice. It seemed that a body had been discovered early on the preceding morning floating in one of the small canals connecting the Fondamente Nuove with the Grand Canal. It had been stabbed in three places; two of the wounds must have been fatal. The papers in the pocket identified the murdered man as the famous English traveller, poet, and journalist, Mr. Geoffrey Cliffe. Mr. Cliffe had just returned from an arduous winter in the Balkans, where he had rendered superb service to the cause of the Bosnian insurgents. He was well known in Venice, and the terrible event had caused a profound sensation there. No clew to the outrage had yet been obtained. But Mr. Cliffe's purse and watch had not been removed.
The Dean arrived in Venice by the midnight train, and went to the hotel on the Riva whither Lady Alice had directed him. She was still up, waiting to see him, and in the dark passage outside Kitty's door she told him what she knew of the murder. It appeared that late that night a startling arrest had been made—of no less a person than the Signorina Ricci, the well-known actress of the Apollo Theatre, and of two men supposed to have been hired by her for the deed. This news was still unknown to Kitty—she was in bed, and her companion had kept it from her.
"How is she?" asked the Dean.
"Frightfully excited—or else dumb. She let me give her something to make her sleep. Strangely enough, she said to me this morning on the way from Treviso: 'It is a woman—and I know her!'"
The following day, when the Dean entered the dingy hotel sitting-room, a thin figure in black came hurriedly out of the bedroom beside it, and Kitty caught him by the hand.
"Isn't it horrible?" she said, staring at him with her changed, dark-rimmed eyes. "She tried once, in Bosnia. One of the Italians who came out with us—she had got hold of him. Do you think—he suffered?"
Her voice was quite quiet. The Dean shuddered.
"One of the stabs was in the heart," he said. "But try and put it from you, Lady Kitty. Sit down." He touched her gently on the shoulder.