Now I greatly mistrusted that sick-friend story. So many fast young Englishmen whom I knew had adopted the same lie to cover their little peccadilloes that I was quite sure Pallanza had employed the same fiction to prevent the scandal of his intrigue with this unknown woman from reaching the ears of his _fiancée_. Bianca was a very proud girl, and I felt certain, from what little I had seen of her character, that if she discovered Guiseppe was playing her false, she would at once break off the engagement at any cost. Like all Italian women, when she loved she loved with her whole soul, and expected the same single-hearted return to her passion; so that the discovery of her lover's infidelity could only be punished sufficiently, according to her ideas, by an everlasting parting between them. Pallanza knew this, and therefore tried to hide his guilt by the plausible story of his dying friend, which appeared to me to be such a remarkably weak fabrication that, before going to the Palazzo Morone, I determined to find out if this mythical invalid existed. Curiously enough, although I was studying for the musical profession and was devoted to operatic performances, I had not been to the Teatro Ezzelino since my arrival at Verona, preferring to wander about the streets of the romantic old city in the moonlight to sitting night after night in a stifling atmosphere of heat, glare, and noise. I made up my mind, however, to go on this special night, in the hope that I might hear some talk about Pallanza's disappearance, and be guided thereby in any future movements; but meantime I went to the theatre in the afternoon, and, introducing myself to the impresario as a friend of Guiseppe's, asked him if he had heard any news of the missing tenor. The impresario, a dingy old man of doubtful cleanliness, was in despair, and raged against the absent Pallanza like a Garrick of the gutter. He had heard nothing of this birbánte--this ladrone who had thus disappeared, and left an honest impresario in the lurch. "Faust" was the success of the season; without Pallanza there could be no "Faust," and the season would be a failure. What was he to do? Cospetto! it was the luck of the devil. Why had this scellerato run away? A sick friend? Bah! there was no sick friend. It was a woman who had enticed away this pazzo. A dying friend from Rome was not a very likely story, but a lie--a large and magnificent lie. Here was the basso of his company, who had been singing with Pallanza at the Apollo; ask him, truth is on his lips, Behold this good man!