The peasants looked at one another with a meaning smile and shook their heads. I saw that they thought I had been drinking, so, giving a piece of money to the fat woman who had spoken, I took my way at once to my hotel, which I reached in a state of bewilderment better imagined than described.

CHAPTER III.
THE FEAST OF GHOSTS.

Was it a dream? Common-sense said "Yes." My bruises said "No!" But certainly the whole affair was most remarkable, and quite out of the ordinary kind of events which take place in this prosaic nineteenth century. We have done with those romantic episodes in which the heroes and heroines of Boccaccio, Le Sage and M. Dumas père take part, and in the searching light of the Press lantern, which is nowadays turned on all things and on all men, it is impossible to encounter those strange events of the middle ages. Judging from my experiences of the previous night I had been entangled in a terrible intrigue, which might have taken place under Henri Trois or Lorenzo di Medici, yet, as the past can never become the present, the whole affair was a manifest anachronism. I was inclined to think that I had been the sport of some Italian Puck, but as there are no fairies nowadays, such an idea was absurd, so the only feasible explanation of the bizarre occurrence was that I had been dreaming.

I had certainly gone to the old burial-ground and had seen the phantom of Lucrezia Borgia emerge from an old Veronese tomb, and as certainly I had followed her to the Piazza Vittoria Emanuele, but here, without doubt, reality ended and fiction began. Evidently I had sat down upon the stone bench where I was discovered by the peasants, and had there fallen asleep to undergo this extravagant adventure in a vision of the night. In sleep I had dreamed a dream after the fashion of the Athenian lovers in Shakespeare's comedy, and the antique chamber, the quaint costumes, and the phantom characters had been idle visions of the brain, which had played their several parts in this medieval phantasmagoria.

To put entirely to one side the impossibility of living people dressing themselves in rococo costumes in order to play a fantastic comedy-tragedy in a deserted place, if I had really seen all I imagined, how did I find myself in the Piazza Vittoria Emanuele at daybreak? The visionary pursuit of the lady of the sepulcher had been a long one, and I certainly could not have walked back such a distance to the Piazza without knowing something about it. But memory ceased at my fainting at the door of the fatal chamber, and revived on my finding myself on the stone bench in the 

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