When Isabel returned from her interview with Angelo, to the house of Mariana, where the duke had appointed her to meet him, he said, “Well met, and in good time; what is the news from this good deputy?” Isabel related the manner in which she had settled the affair.  “Angelo,” said she, “has a garden surrounded with a brick wall, on the western side of which is a vineyard, and to that vineyard is a gate.”  And then she shewed to the duke and Mariana two keys that Angelo had given her; and she said, “This bigger key opens the vineyard gate; this other a little door which leads from the vineyard to the garden.  There I have made my promise at the dead of the night to call upon him, and have got from him his word of assurance for my brother’s life.  I have taken a due and wary note of the place; and with whispering and most guilty diligence he shewed me the way twice over.”  “Are there no other tokens agreed upon between you, that Mariana must observe?” said the duke.  “No, none,” said Isabel, “only to go when it is dark.  I have told him my time can be but short; for I have made him think a servant comes along with me, and that this servant is persuaded I come about my brother.”  The duke commended her discreet management, and she turning to Mariana, said, “Little have you to say to Angelo, when you depart from him, but soft and low Remember now my brother!”

Mariana was that night conducted to the appointed place by Isabel, who rejoiced that she had, as she supposed, by this device preserved both her brother’s life and her own honour.  But that her brother’s life was safe the duke was not so well satisfied, and therefore at midnight he again repaired to the prison, and it was well for Claudio that he did so, else would Claudio have that night been beheaded; for soon after the duke entered the prison, an order came from the cruel deputy commanding that Claudio should be beheaded, and his head sent to him by five o’clock in the morning.  But the duke persuaded the provost to put off the execution of Claudio, and to deceive Angelo by sending him the head of a man who died that morning in the prison.  And to prevail upon the provost to agree to this, the duke, whom still the provost suspected not to be any thing more or greater than he seemed, shewed the provost a letter written with the duke’s hand, and sealed with his seal, which when the provost saw, he concluded this friar must have some secret order from the absent duke, and therefore he consented to spare Claudio; and he cut off the dead man’s head, and carried it to Angelo.

Then the duke, in his own name, wrote to Angelo a letter, saying that certain accidents had put a stop to his journey, and that he should be in Vienna by the following morning, requiring Angelo to meet him at the entrance of the city, there to deliver up his authority; and the duke also commanded it to be proclaimed, that if any of his subjects craved redress for injustice, they should exhibit their petitions in the street on his first entrance into the city.