"But--Eccellenza--my master is not here! . . ."
Prince Pietro paying no heed to him, strode into the house, and
brusquely threw open the door of a room which he knew to be
Varillo's own specially private retreat. A woman with a mass of
bright orange-gold hair, half-dressed in a tawdry blue peignoir
trimmed with cheap lace, was sprawling lazily on a sofa smoking a
cigarette. She sprang up surprised and indignant,--but shrank back
visibly as she recognised the intruder, and met the steady tigerish
glare of the old man's eyes.
"Where is your lover?" he asked.
"Eccellensa! You amaze--you insult me--!"
"Basta!" and Sovrani came a step nearer to her, his wrath seeming to
literally encompass him like a thunder-cloud--"Play me no tricks!
This is not the time for lying! I repeat my question--where is he?
You, the companion of his closest thoughts,--you, his 'model'--you,
Mademoiselle Pon-Pon, his mistress--you must know all his movements.
Tell me then, where he is--or by heaven, if you do not, I will have
you arrested for complicity in murder!"
She fell back from him trembling, her full red mouth half open,--and
her face paling with terror.
"Murder!" she whispered--"Dio mio! Dio mio!"
"Yes--murder!" and the Prince thrust before her wide-opened eyes the
dagger-sheath he held--"What! Have you not heard? Not yet? Not
though the whole city rings with the news? What news? That Angela
Sovrani is dead! That she--my daughter--the sweetest, purest, most
innocent and loving of women as well as the greatest and most
gifted--has been mortally stabbed in her own studio this very day by
some cowardly fiend unknown! Unknown did I say? Not so--known! This
sheath belongs to Florian Varillo.
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