Signor Fortini had apparently got some other and newly-conceived thought in his mind. He looked two or three times shrewdly and furtively into the face of the young Marchese; and closely compressed his thin lips together, and drew into a knot the shaggy eye-brows over his clear and thoughtful eyes. Some notion had been suggested to his mind which very plainly he did not like.
At the gate nothing had been seen of the object of their search. The octroi officers perfectly well remembered seeing the Marchese Ludovico, who was well known to them by sight, drive through the gate very early that morning in a bagarino with a lady. One man had recognised the lady as the prima donna at the opera. And they were very sure that she had not returned to the city since, at least by that gate.
But one of the officers volunteered the information that another young lady had that morning passed out of the city on foot a little before the time at which the bagarino had passed with the Marchese and the prima donna. And the men, after some consultation together, were sure that neither had that young lady returned by the gate they guarded.
Ludovico looked at the lawyer, and the lawyer looked at Ludovico; but neither of them could suggest anything in explanation of so strange a circumstance.
"I saw nothing of any such person either in the Pineta or on the road," said Ludovico. "Who could it have been?"
The old lawyer only shrugged his shoulders in reply
"There is a young lady," resumed Ludovico, after some minutes of thought, "a friend of mine—a young artist engaged in making copies from the mosaics in our churches. I know that it was her purpose shortly to begin some work of this kind at St. Apollinare in Classe. It may be that she had selected this morning for the purpose of going out to look at her task,—though I almost think that I should have been informed of her intention."
"The plot seems to thicken with a vengeance," said the lawyer, with an impatient shrug, and a slight sneer of ill-humour, provoked by the multiplicity of his young client's lady friends. "I daresay," he added, "the young ladies are not playing hide-and-seek in the Pineta all by themselves."
"But what had I better do?" said the young Marchese, looking with increased anxiety into the lawyer's face; "the fact is—you see, Signor Giovacchino, this new idea, this possibility that Paolina—that is the young artist's name—may be—may have been in the forest—in short, I feel more uneasy than before till I can learn what has become of both of them."
"Do you mean," said the lawyer, with a sneer in his voice, but at the same time looking into his companion's face with a shrewd expression of investigation in his eye,—"do you mean that the two ladies may possibly have fallen in with each other, and may in such case not improbably have fallen out with each other? You know best, Signor Marchese, the likelihood of any trouble arising out of such a meeting."