“Signorina Bianca!”

“But what—­what brings you?” she stammered, still between quick gasps for breath.

In the darkness, close by, a door slammed.

“Ah!” said I, drawing in my breath.  Stretching out a hand, I laid it on her shoulder, from which the cloak fell away, disclosing a frosty glint of tinsel.  “So it was for you the Prince drove home early from the theatre!  But why is the door left open?”

Pretty Bianca began to whimper.  “I—­I do not know; unless some one has stolen my key.”  She put a hand down to fumble in the pocket of her cloak.

“Then we had best discover,” said I, and drew her (though not ungently) to the door.  I found it after a little groping and, lifting the latch—­for the gust of wind had fastened it—­thrust it open upon a light which, though by no means brilliant, dazzled me after the darkness of the alley.

I had counted on the door’s opening straight into the garden.  To my dismay I found myself in a narrow vestibule floored with lozenges of black and white marble and running, under the wall to my left, towards an archway where a dim lamp burned before a velvet curtain.  For a moment I halted irresolute, and then, slipping a hand under Bianca’s arm, led her forward to the archway and drew aside the curtain.

Again I stood blinking, dazzled by the light of many candles—­or were they but two or three candles, multiplied by the mirrors around the walls and the gleams from the gilded furniture?  And what—­merciful God, what!—­was that foul thing hanging from the central chandelier?—­hanging there while its shadow, thrown upward past the glass pendants, wavered in a black blot that seemed to expand and contract upon the ceiling?

It was a man hanging there, with his neck bent over the curtain’s rope that corded it to the chandelier; a man in a priest’s frock, under which his bare feet dangled limp and hideous.

As the unhappy Bianca slid from under my arm to the floor, I tiptoed forward and stared up into the face.  It was the face of the priest Domenico, livid, distorted, grinning down at me.  With a shiver I sprang past the corpse for a doorway facing me, that led still further into this unholy pavilion.  The curtain before it had been wrenched away from the rings over the lintel—­by the hand, no doubt, of the poor wretch as he had been haled to execution—­since, save for a missing cord, the furniture of the room was undisturbed.  The room beyond was bare, uncarpeted, and furnished like a workshop.  A solitary lamp burned low on a bracket, over a table littered with tools, and in the middle of the room stood a brazier, the coals in it yet glowing, with five or sick steel-handled implements left as they had been thrust into the heart of the fire.  Were they, then, also torturers, these murderers?