When supper was over, and the night advancing, the Cardinal advised Don Juan that it was time to return to the Vatican where they lodged. In view of the popular delusions concerning this occurrence, it may be advisable to refer to the fact that sunset was taken to end a twenty-four hours day; that “one hour of the night,” _i.e._, one hour after sunset, was the fashionable supper-time, which at this time of the year (the fourteenth of June) would be about 9 P.M. Before midnight then, at a generous computation, the Cardinal and the Duke of Gandia mounted their horses and rode through Rome together as far as the palace of the Vicechancellor attended by a small escort. It is worth noting that the palace of the Vicechancellor was not the Cancelleria, the palace of the Chancery at San Lorenzo _in Damaso_, perhaps the most beautiful palace in the world, which Messer Bramante Lazzari built for the white-faced Cardinal Rafaele Galeotto Sanzoni-Riario: but the new palace built by Cardinal Rodrigo de Lançol y Borja, and given by him after His election to the Supreme Pontificate, to the Vicechancellor-Cardinal Ascanio Maria Sforza-Visconti; (now Palazzo Sforza-Cesarini on Banchi Vecchi). There, the ardent Duke (he already was married to a princess of Spain, and the father of two children,) said to the Cardinal that, before going home, he wanted to amuse himself somewhere; and, taking leave of the said Most Worshipful Lord, and dismissing his suite with the exception of a certain bully whom he kept, he took on his crupper an unknown man in a mask who waited there, and who daily during a month had come to see him at the Vatican, as well as on this very night during the supper in the garden of his mother. Then he turned his horse in the direction of the Jews’ Quarter, (there was no Ghetto till 1556), and disappeared in the twilight of a midsummer night. He never again was seen alive. When the City awoke in the morning, (Romans always were early risers,) the Duke of Gandia’s bully was found on Piazza Giudei, wounded by the steel of an assassin; and all efforts to obtain information from him proved futile. He died without having spoken. The news trickled into the Vatican, and was mentioned to the Pope; who thought that perhaps Don Juan was staying with some courtesan, wishing out of consideration for his Father to avoid the scandal of being seen to issue from such a house in open day. But when night came again, and the Duke did not appear, the Pope’s Holiness took alarm; and ordered an inquisition and the usual dragging of Tiber. The wags of Rome instantly said that, notwithstanding all that Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere had alleged concerning the election of the Lord Alexander P.P. VI as being simoniacal, it was now certain that He was a true Successor of St. Peter as a Fisher of men.