Among the few whose lives and activities seemed to be unaffected by the stifling atmosphere, which depressed all spirits, was also Andrea Delfin. The morning after the crime, he had, like all the other secret spies, been interrogated by the successor of that unfortunate secretary who had put him on the payroll, concerning his observations at the hour of the crime, and had presented him the fairy-tale of a trip to the lido, on which he had the intention to investigate how the fisherman thought about all this. What he could tell them about what was going on in the hotel of the Austrian ambassador and the palace of the countess - meaningless facts, which the tribunal already knew for a long time - at least proved his zeal to familiarise himself with his new task. His friend Samuele did not fail to inform against the striking familiarity he had found between the man from Brescia and the secretary of the embassy. Calmly, Andrea explained himself, and the old acquaintance from Riva could only be advantageous for the intentions of the tribunal. Thus, almost no day passed by, when he would not, after he was done with his work for the notary, call on his German friend, to whom, being cut off from other company, the conversations with the grave man, clouded by secret grief, became, by and by, a necessity. He had developed an unlimited trust in Andrea, and when he avoided political topics with him, it was more because he could not hope that they would understand each other on account of their different nationalities, than for a concern that Andrea might abuse his openness. He even told him with a laughing face that he had been warned against him being a spy of the tribunal. The carelessness with which he crossed the shunned threshold of the foreign ambassador every day would, of course, catch people's attention. "I'm no nobile," replied Andrea with a calm face. "The ten men will realise that I don't seek any diplomatic connections here; they didn't even think me worthy of a warning up to now. But I've come to like you, and it would pain me to forgo forcing my unpleasant company on you from time to time, for I'm a perfectly lonely man. Even my kind landlady, who in the past used to shorten the time for me with her proverbs for an hour or so, doesn't enter my room any more. She's ill, and what made her ill is Venice and pale shadows haunting this city."