“You have been taking home a lady in a yellow domino from the masquerade?” said D’Arbino, putting some money into the coachman’s hand. “Yes, sir; I was engaged by that lady for the evening--engaged to drive her to the ball as well as to drive her home.” “Where did you take her from?” “From a very extraordinary place--from the gate of the Campo Santo burial-ground.” During this colloquy, Finello and D’Arbino had been standing with Fabio between them, each giving him an arm. The instant the last answer was given, he reeled back with a cry of horror. “Where have you taken her to now?” asked D’Arbino. He looked about him nervously as he put the question, and spoke for the first time in a whisper. “To the Campo Santo again,” said the coachman. Fabio suddenly drew his arms out of the arms of his friends, and sank to his knees on the ground, hiding his face. From some broken ejaculations which escaped him, it seemed as if he dreaded that his senses were leaving him, and that he was praying to be preserved in his right mind. “Why is he so violently agitated?” said Finello, eagerly, to his friend. “Hush!” returned the other. “You heard him say that when he saw the face behind the yellow mask, it was the face of his dead wife?” “Yes. But what then?” “His wife was buried in the Campo Santo.” CHAPTER V. Of all the persons who had been present, in any capacity, at the Marquis Melani’s ball, the earliest riser on the morning after it was Nanina. The agitation produced by the strange events in which she had been concerned destroyed the very idea of sleep. Through the hours of darkness she could not even close her eyes; and, as soon as the new day broke, she rose to breathe the early morning air at her window, and to think in perfect tranquillity over all that had passed since she entered the Melani Palace to wait on the guests at the masquerade. On reaching home the previous night, all her other sensations had been absorbed in a vague feeling of mingled dread and curiosity, produced by the sight of the weird figure in the yellow mask, which she had left standing alone with Fabio in the palace corridor. The morning light, however, suggested new thoughts. She now opened the note which the young nobleman had pressed into her hand, and read over and over again the hurried pencil lines scrawled on the paper. Could there be any harm, any forgetfulness of her own duty, in using the key inclosed in the note, and keeping her appointment in the Ascoli gardens at ten o’clock? Surely not--surely the last sentence he had written, “Believe in my truth and honor, Nanina, for I believe implicitly in yours,” was enough to satisfy her this time that she could not be doing wrong in listening for once to the pleading of her own heart. And besides, there in her lap lay the key of the wicket-gate. It was absolutely necessary to use that, if only for the purpose of giving it back safely into the hand of its owner.