The interior was familiar to me--a squalid little den, some ten feet square, whose dirty, brown-paper-patched window looked out over the chimneys and yards of the "Little Hell" district. In one corner of the room was a mysterious cupboard, through which a neighbouring chimney contrived to let in a constant supply of filthy black smoke. The bare unwashed boards were rotting away, and at one spot the leg of the bed had gone through the floor, to the considerable alarm of its dormant occupant. The wall-paper, which had once been a gorgeous combination of pink and cobalt and silver, was tattered and discoloured, and so greasy that one might imagine that generations of squalid lodgers had made their meals off it. The furniture consisted of a small table, now covered with a perpetual litter of papers; a ramshackle wash-hand stand, on which a broken vegetable dish served as a receptacle for soap and such objects; a bed, which bred remarkable crops of fleas, and to which clung an old patchwork quilt, but which was otherwise poor in adornment; a chair, and an old travelling-box. As I have already mentioned, a trap-door in the floor gave access to this apartment. There was no other door. When I entered Giannoli was sitting at his table with his face buried in his hands, so deeply absorbed in his own reflections that for some seconds he did not notice my advent. When at last I made my presence known to him he gave a violent start, and, holding out both his hands, he wrung mine for some moments in silence. Then he motioned me to the box; I seated myself; once more he became silent; then, suddenly raising his head, he looked me full in the face. "Do you know why I wished to speak to you?" he asked; "can you guess? Oh, it is no light matter, Isabel, which has led me to trouble you, no pleasant matter either. I am on the brink of ruin, threatened and betrayed by my most trusted friends. I must leave here at once, go right away from London and England. My life is not safe here for another day." He spoke in Italian, and as he grew more excited his voice rose higher and higher, though every now and again he was minded to control it, as though fearing he might be overheard. "Yes," he continued, "those men whom I have most trusted, whom I have treated as my own brothers, with whom I have often shared my last shilling and the very clothes off my back, have turned against me. They are in league to destroy me. They are plotting against my liberty and my life!" For some minutes he raved on in this style, every now and again breaking off into curses, while I listened half horrified, half incredulous. "For goodness' sake," I exclaimed at last, "do try and be calmer, Giannoli, and tell me what has happened and what you wish me to do."