“Like many another discoverer, he pushed his discovery too far.  He reasoned—­but the reasoning was not in pari materia—­that what he had applied to Art he could apply to Religion.  In compliment to what he understood to be the ancient faith of the Desboroughs he had embraced the principles of Roman Catholicism—­his motto, by the way, was Thorough—­and this landed him, shortly after middle age, in an awkward predicament.  He had, in an access of spleen, set fire to the house of a client whose payments were in arrear.  The good priest who confessed him recommended, nay enjoined, an expiatory pilgrimage to Rome; and my uncle, on the excuse of a rush of orders, despatched a junior clerk to perform the pilgrimage for him.

“For a time all went well.  The young man (whom my uncle had promoted from the painting of public-house sign-boards) made his way to Rome, saluted the statue of the Fisherman, climbed on his knees up the Scala Sancta, laid out the prescribed sum on relics, beads, scapulars, medals, and what-not, and, in short, fulfilled all the articles of my uncle’s vow.  On the second evening, after an exhausting tour of the churches, he sat down in a tavern, and incautiously, upon an empty stomach, treated himself to a whole flask of the white wine of Sicily.  It produced a revulsion, in which he remembered his Protestant upbringing; and the upshot was, a Switzer found him, late that night, supine in the roadway beneath the Vatican gardens, gazing up at the moon and damning the Pope.  Behaviour so little consonant with his letters of introduction naturally awoke misgivings.  He was taken to the cells, where he broke down, and with crapulous tears confessed the imposture; which so incensed His Holiness that my uncle only bought himself off excommunication by payment of a crippling sum down, and an annual tribute of his own weight (sixteen stone twelve) in candles of pure spermaceti.  O Badcock, fill Donna Julia’s glass, and pass the bottle!”

We spent the next five days in company with these strange fellow-lodgers, and more than once it gave me an uncanny feeling to turn in the midst of Mr. Fett’s prattle and, catching the eye of Marc’antonio or Stephanu as they sat and listened with absolute gravity, to reflect on the desperate business we were here to do.  We went about the city openly, no man suspecting us.  On the day after our arrival we discovered the Prince Camillo’s quarters.  The Republic had lodged him, with a small retinue, in the Palazzo Verde, a handsome building (though not to be reckoned among the statelier palaces of the city), with a front on the Via Balbi, and a garden enclosed by high walls, around which ran the discreetest of vicoli.  One of the Dorias, so tradition said, had built it to house a mistress, early in the seventeenth century.  I doubt not the Prince Camillo found comfortable quarters there.  For the rest, he had begun to enjoy himself after the fashion he had learnt in Brussels, returning to dissipation