Page:William Le Queux - The Czar's Spy.djvu/165

Rh Lucca of using a knife — eh? I recollect quite well that affair — a love affair, was it not?"

"Yes, signor commendatore. But I was a youth then — a mere boy."

"Then tell me the circumstances in which Armida has disappeared," I urged, for I saw quite plainly that his sudden meeting with me had upset him, and that he was trying to hold back from me some story which he was bursting to tell.

"Well, signore," he said at last in a low tone of confidence, "I don't like to trouble you with my private affairs after those untruths I told you when we first met."

"Go on," I said. "Tell me the truth."

After the exciting incidents of our last meeting, I was half inclined to doubt him.

"The truth is, signor commendatore, that my wife has mysteriously disappeared. Last Saturday, at eleven o'clock, she was talking over the garden wall with a neighbour and was then dressed to go out. She apparently went out, but from that moment no one has seen or heard of her."

It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him the ghastly truth, yet so strange was the circumstance that his own double, even to the mole upon his face, should be lying dead and buried in Scotland that I hesitated to relate what I knew.

"She spoke English, I suppose?"

"She could make herself understood very well," he said with a sigh, and I saw a heavy thoughtful look upon his brow. That he was really devoted to her, I knew. With the Italian of whatever station in