The subtle Eastern poison—for such it afterwards proved to be—had done its work swiftly, completely. Lionello Nenci—conspirator, murderer, and outlaw, one of the most desperate and dangerous characters that Italy has produced during the past decade, and the miscreant whose arrest had been stipulated by the Marquis Montelupo in his compact with Gemma—was dead.
Le Funaro was free. The terrible thraldom which had compelled her to act as secret agent of the State was for ever ended.
Chapter Thirty One.
Fiori d’Arancio.
Nearly a year had gone by.
The strange suicide of an Italian at the Hotel Victoria had been regarded merely as a tragic incident by readers of newspapers, for no word of the motive which led Nenci to take his life had been allowed to leak out.
To the public, the death of Vittorina still remains one of London’s many mysteries.
In the few brief months that had elapsed, peace, calm and complete, had come to Gemma and to Charles Armytage; for one morning, in the dimly lit old Church of Santa Maria Novella, in Florence, and afterwards at the Office of the British Consul-General in the Via Tornabuoni, they had been made man and wife. Then, for nearly six months, they had travelled in Austria, Switzerland, and Germany, subsequently spending the winter in a furnished villa high up on the olive-clad hill behind Cimiez, where they were visited by Captain Tristram and Carmenilla, who, too, had married, and were spending their honeymoon on the Riviera. At last, when Carnival had come and gone, the season waned, and Nice and Cannes were emptying, they, too, left and returned to the great old Palazza Funaro in Florence.