Things were going well with Italy. On that day the _Corriere_ had published a long dispatch from General Cadorna, reporting a smashing defeat of the Austrians in the Alps, and an advance in the direction of Trieste. The whole kingdom of Italy, from Ravenna to Reggio, was in a state of highest enthusiasm, and in Sarzana the excited populace were agog in the cafes and in the narrow, old-world streets. That most elegant fourteenth-century salon, with its faded tapestries and fine old portraits, in which the woman was seated with her visitor, was the same great room in which the Doge Francesco Bissolo, of Venice, assembled the famous Council of Ten, when they consulted with Malatesta after the Battle of Padua in 1405. The Bissolo Palace, the dark, almost prison-like walls of which rose sheer from the canal within a stone's throw of the great naval dockyard, had little changed through five centuries. Its exterior was grim and forbidding, with windows barred with iron, its massive doors, which opened upon the narrow mediaeval street, heavily studded with nails and strengthened with iron. Within, however, while most of its antique charm had been preserved, it was the acme of luxury and taste, containing many priceless works of art, magnificent tapestries, and the famous collection of ancient arms belonging to its present owner, the Marchese Guilio Michelozzo-Alfani, whose pretty young wife was that afternoon giving tea to a visitor. "No!" the woman exclaimed, in a low, intense whisper. "No, Carlo, you would never do that. I know that once I treated you badly, and I was your enemy then. But that is long ago. To-day I am your friend. Guilio must never know the truth. In his position as Admiral of the Port it would mean ruin for him if the truth were revealed that I am an Austrian, and hence an enemy." "Yes. I agree that it would be very awkward for you, my dear Elena, if the truth ever leaked out," remarked the thin, sallow-faced, middle-aged man, as he sipped the cup of tea, in English fashion, which she had handed him. About his lips was a strange hardness, even though his friendship was so apparent. "But you alone know, my dear Carlo, and you will never give me away. We were old friends in Budapest--ah! I wish to forget those days--before I married Guilio," she remarked softly, with a bitter smile. "My dear Elena, don't think that I've called to threaten you," exclaimed Carlo Corradini, the well-dressed Italian, who lived such a gay existence in Rome, and who was so well known in the cosmopolitan life of the Corso and the Pincio. "Why should I? I am here, in Sarzana, upon a secret mission--in order to speak with you." "Why?" "Well,"--as he paused he looked the young wife of the Italian Admiral full in the face--"well, because, though your country is at war with Italy to-day, Austria has still friends in Italy, just as Germany has."