To his landlady, Signoria Giovanna, he said the next morning that there had been a lot of work to be done for his employer, so that they had to make use of the night. This was the only time he needed the key for the front door. Usually, he was already back at nightfall, only had some bread and wine, and put out his light early, so that the good woman praised him all over the neighbourhood as a paragon of hard labour and decent living. Only one thing she complained about: that he would not conserve his strength and that he, at his age, would not take part in any permissable entertainment, which would cheer him up and prolong his life. Whenever she talked like this, Marietta was quiet and look down into her lap. As soon as the stranger was in his room, she stopped singing, and quite generally gave the impression as if, since the stranger's arrival, she had spend more time pondering than she would previously have done in a year. In the morning of the second Sunday which Andrea had spent in the widow's house, the woman entered his room in a hurry with a disturbed look on her face, dressed in her best clothes, just as she had returned from church. He sat at the table, was not fully dressed yet, and read in one of his prayer-books. His face was paler than usually, but his eyes were calm, and it seemed as if he disliked being disturbed in his meditation. "What are you still sitting quietly in your room, Signore Andrea," she called out to him, "while all of Venice is up and about? Hurry up and get dressed and go out into the street for yourself, where you'll be able to see as many horror-stricken faces as there are pieces of grain in a mill. Holy Jesus! That I've got to live to see the day, and I've thought there was nothing else that could happen in Venice to surprise me!" "What are you talking about, good woman?" he asked in an indifferent tone and put the book down. She threw herself onto a chair and seemed to be very exhausted. "All the way to the Piazzetta, the crowd has been pushing me," she started again, "and there I saw the gentlemen of the Great Council climbing in droves up the huge staircase in the court of the Doges' Palace and the flags of mourning waving in the windows of the Procurators' Offices. Will you believe it? Tonight, between eleven and midnight, the most noble one of the three inquisitors of the state, the venerable lord Lorenzo Venier, has been murdered on the threshold of his own house." "Has he lived to an old age?" Andrea asked calmly.