sps
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
t