His bit of candle burnt itself out before he had taken Gaston completely round, and he returned to fetch another, leaving Gaston in a corner of the vault where the light was a mere glimmer. Right opposite to him in this place was a massive coffin with rich chasings, whose grisly inmate was wrapped from head to foot in a mantle of black velvet. Every particle of flesh had melted from the face, the hair had fallen from the head, the eyeless sockets stared from the depths of the velvet hood. The skeleton was richly dight and finely housed; it was Death himself lying in state. The monk came up with a fresh candle, and Gaston stooped down and peered into the coffin. Above the figure’s head was affixed a miniature on ivory, which represented a young man in the first prime of life, of a refined and beautiful countenance. In the folds of the mantle a card had tumbled, and stooping lower, Gaston read on it the name of Udalrico Verga. There was a small round hole in the skull, just over the left temple. “_Ucciso_, signor!” (Murdered!) said the monk, behind him. The Italian word sounded softly in the lips of the monk; but there was the tell-tale hole in the forehead. This then was the hero and the victim of that old tragedy; this was the end of him! But for his punctured skull, he might have changed places with any of the least repulsive of his skeleton companions. But his little bullet-hole marked him out from all of them. Curiously, the hood had slipped off from the left side of the skull, and as this was the side next to the spectator, the bullet-hole compelled attention to itself at once. The story of the murder which the baron had told to Gaston, and with which his thoughts had many times been occupied in the Villa Torcello, came before him again; and looking at the stark remains of the victim of that forgotten crime, he felt a sudden and irresistible longing to know its secret. If he could win it from the coffin there! But the grim rest within would be disturbed no more. And the young man pictured there beside the skeleton? Murder had no meaning for him; he had not come to know it when he was pictured thus. The face impressed Gaston strangely. He looked at it long, till he began to fancy that behind its delicate beauty he saw the tokens of a latent sensuality. But it was a face of singular sweetness, and if any evil were there, it existed only in the colourless form of a suggestion. And the priest, who had died a suspect? Was _he_ here, and did death whisper anything against him? No, the monk said; the priest was a native of Syracuse, and after his death his body had been carried there. Gaston had seen enough; the chamber and its horrid tenants had given him a sense of physical sickness; and, above all, some curious malign influence seemed to issue from the coffin of Udalrico Verga, which was working its way into his brain.