Again I stood blinking, dazzled by the light of many candles--or were they but two or three candles, multiplied by the mirrors around the walls and the gleams from the gilded furniture? And what--merciful God, _what!_--was that foul thing hanging from the central chandelier?--hanging there while its shadow, thrown upward past the glass pendants, wavered in a black blot that seemed to expand and contract upon the ceiling? It was a man hanging there, with his neck bent over the curtain's rope that corded it to the chandelier; a man in a priest's frock, under which his bare feet dangled limp and hideous. As the unhappy Bianca slid from under my arm to the floor, I tiptoed forward and stared up into the face. It was the face of the priest Domenico, livid, distorted, grinning down at me. With a shiver I sprang past the corpse for a doorway facing me, that led still further into this unholy pavilion. The curtain before it had been wrenched away from the rings over the lintel--by the hand, no doubt, of the poor wretch as he had been haled to execution--since, save for a missing cord, the furniture of the room was undisturbed. The room beyond was bare, uncarpeted, and furnished like a workshop. A solitary lamp burned low on a bracket, over a table littered with tools, and in the middle of the room stood a brazier, the coals in it yet glowing, with five or sick steel-handled implements left as they had been thrust into the heart of the fire. Were they, then, also torturers, these murderers? My eyes turned again to the work-table. On it, among the tools, rested a crown--the crown of Corsica! Nay, there were two--two crowns of Corsica! . . . In what new art of treachery had the man been surprised? Treachery to Genoa, on top of treachery to Corsica. . . . The crowns were surprisingly alike, even to the stones around the band--and I bethought me of the jeweller I had met in the alley. But, feeling around the rim of each, I recognized the true one by a dent it had taken against the _Gauntlet's_ ballast. Quick as thought, then, I whipped it under my arm, ran back to Bianca, and thrust it under her cloak as I bent over her. She lay in a cold swoon. I could not leave her in this horrible place. . . . I was lifting her to carry her out into the alley, when--in the workshop or beyond it--a key grated in a lock; and I raised myself erect as the Prince Camillo came through the pavilion, humming a careless tune of opera. "Hola!" he broke off and called, "Hola, padre, where the devil are you hiding? And where's the pretty Bianca? . . . O, confusion seize your puss-in-the-corner! I shall be jealous, I tell you--and br-r-h! what a mistral of a draught!"