"Ah! This war is all so horrible," declared the Marchesa, with a slight shudder. "You Italians hate every Austrian with a fierce and deadly hatred." "Pardon me, my dear Elena, but you Austrians hate us just as fiercely," he laughed. "Where is Guilio?" "At his office. He will not be back until seven. He always goes to the Club to take his vermouth there." Corradini glanced at the door to make certain it was closed; then, bending across the little table with its splendid silver service, he whispered: "I have a secret message for you--from somebody you know." "A secret message--what?" asked the young Marchesa, opening her fine eyes widely. "From the Herrengasse, number seven." "From Vienna?" she asked, in surprise, for the address he had given her was the bureau of the Austro-Hungarian Council of Ministers. He nodded mysteriously, and with a grin said: "From your old friend Schreyer." She drew a long breath and went pale for a second. Mention of that name recalled to her a remembrance of the past--of the days when she was a dancer at the Raimund Theatre in Vienna, and when Count Schreyer had, after a brief acquaintance, offered her his hand. But she had disliked him because he was such a cold, harsh bureaucrat, who had at that time occupied a high position at the Ministry of the Interior, and who possessed, as she once told a friend, "a heart of granite." Elena's life-story had been a rather curious one, but, after all, not much out of the commonplace. The daughter of a poor Austrian musician in the orchestra at the Weiner Burger Theatre, in Vienna, and of an Italian mother, she had learned Italian from her birth, and on going to Italy to fulfil an engagement at the Politeama, at Livorno, she had posed as an Italian, though hitherto she had lived all her life in Austria, and had been taught to hate her dead mother's race. As an Italian, she had met, and afterwards married, the middle-aged Marchese Michelozzo-Alfani, at that time a Vice-Admiral of the Fleet. For three years prior to the war her life had been quiet and uneventful. The summer she spent out at Antignano, on the seashore, three miles from Livorno--or Leghorn, as the English call it--where they rented a big white villa amid the vines and olives; in spring, on the Lake of Garda; in autumn, in Florence; and winter, in Rome. From his early days the Marchese had been a most popular naval officer, who had fought in Abyssinia and in Tripoli, and, being a favourite at the Court of the Quirinale, promotion had come to him rapidly. Before his marriage he had endeavoured to practise economy, in order to redeem the fortunes of his ancient family; but now that his wife Elena proved so extravagant, he found himself getting deeper into debt each day.