Signor Basso-profundo advanced, and though truth might have been on his lips it certainly was not apparent on his face, for a more deceitful countenance I never beheld. However, I have no doubt he spoke truth on this occasion, as there was no money to be made by telling a lie, and he confirmed the words of the wrathful impresario. The sick friend was a myth, but in Rome Pallanza had been friendly with a lady. Per Bacco! a great lady, but the name was unknown to him. It appeared that Signor Basso-profundo dressed in the same room as Pallanza, and it was just before the last act of "Faust" that Guiseppe received the note. He told the basso-profundo that it was from a dying friend, and had departed quickly when the opera was ended, in his stage-dress, with a cloak wrapped round him. The basso-profundo was sure the note was from a lady. The impresario was also sure, and devoted the lady in question to the infernal gods with a richness of expression I have never heard equalled in any language. Having thus found out what I suspected from the first, that the dying friend was a mere invention to cloak an intrigue, I left the impresario to tear his hair and call Guiseppe names in company with Signor Basso-profundo, and went back to my hotel, where I found Peppino waiting with his fiacre to drive me to the Palazzo Morone. He was still unwilling to take me to this place of evil reputation, and made one last effort to shake my determination by gruesome stories of people who had gone into the palazzo and never came out again; but I laughed at all these hobgoblin romances, and getting into the fiacre, told him to drive off at once, which he did, after crossing himself twice, so as to secure his own safety should the ghosts of Palazzo Morone take a fancy to carry me off as a heretic. We speedily left the broad, modern streets, and rattled down gloomy, mediæval passages, the humid atmosphere of which chilled me to the bone, in spite of the heat of the day. The fiacre--with its jingling bells--bumped on the uneven stones, turned abruptly round unexpected corners, corkscrewed itself between narrow walls, crept under low archways, and after innumerable dodgings, twistings, hairbreadth escapes from upsettings, and perilous balancings on the edges of drains, at length emerged into that queer little piazza at the end of which I saw the great façade of the richly-decorated palace I had beheld in the moonlight of two nights before.