t, our
progress was very slow and difficult.

At last, a quarter of an hour or so after we had commenced, Muriel,
standing in the hole and having dug her stake deeply into the ground,
suddenly cried:

"Look! Look, Mr. Gregg! Why--whatever is that?"

I bent forward as she indicated, and my eyes met an object so unexpected
that I was held dumb and motionless.

By what we had succeeded in discovering, the mystery was increased
rather than diminished.

I gave vent to an ejaculation of complete bewilderment, and looked
blankly into my companion's face.

The amazing enigma was surely complete!

CHAPTER VII

CONTAINS A SURPRISE

The first object brought to light, about two feet beneath the surface,
was a piece of dark gray woolen stuff which, when the mold was removed,
proved to be part of a woman's skirt.

With frantic eagerness I got into the hole we had made and removed the
soil with my hands, until I suddenly touched something hard.

A body lay there, doubled up and crushed into the well-like hole the men
had dug.

Together we pulled it out, when, to my surprise, on wiping away the dirt
from the hard waxen features, I recognized it as the body of Armida, the
woman who had been my servant in Leghorn and who had afterwards married
Olinto. Both had been assassinated!

When Muriel gazed upon the dead woman's face she gave vent to an
expression of surprise. The body was evidently not that of the person
she had expected to find.

"Who is she, I wonder?" my companion ejaculated. "Not a lady, evidently,
by her dress and hands."

"Evidently not," was my response, for I still 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 labor.

Armida had been a particularly good housemaid, a black-haired,
black-eyed Tuscan, quick, cleanly, and full of a keen sense of humor. 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