Page:William Le Queux - The Czar's Spy.djvu/143

Rh deemed it best to keep my own counsel. I recollected the story Olinto had told me about his wife; of her illness and her longing to return to Italy. Yet the dead woman's countenance must have been healthy enough in life, although her hands were rough and hard, showing that she had been doing manual labour.

Armida had been a particularly good housemaid, a black-haired, black-eyed Tuscan, quick, cleanly, and full of a keen sense of humour. It was a great shock to me to find her lying there dead. The breast of her dress was stained with dried blood, which, on examination, I found had issued from a deep and fatal wound beneath the ear where she had been struck an unerring blow that had severed the artery.

"Those men — those men who buried her! I wonder who they were?" my companion exclaimed in a hushed voice. "We must follow them and ascertain. They are certainly the murderers who have returned in secret and concealed the evidence of this second crime."

"Yes," I said. "Let us go after them. They must not escape us."

Then, leaving the exhumed body beneath a tree, I caught Muriel by the waist and waded across the deep channel worn by the stream at that point, after which we both ascended the steep bank where the pair had disappeared in the darkness of the wood.

I blamed myself a thousand times for not following them, yet my suspicions had not been aroused until after they had disappeared. The back of the