A countess of doubtful origin marries an English lord; the lord dies at Venice; the palace where it happened cannot afterwards be let. Collins strips his machinery down to dread, money and a room nobody will enter, and the result works equally as a ghost story and as a detective story. Plates of Venetian canals, candlelit corridors and masked revellers open the Gilded Library edition, whose ornament is carnival masks, candelabra and the prow of a gondola.