Corinne, her best-loved niece, always called her "my Dresden china Auntie." There was between them some natural affinity, as well as special affection; though Tante Ilde loved them all, Corinne was the true child of her heart, what the best of daughters might have been. She had never had any children and her life had revolved beneficently about the family of her brother,--only her half-brother to be sure, but then they never thought of that. When he married for the third time, quite superfluously the family considered, the ostensible reason he gave was that it would be a pity to leave no one to enjoy the pension due whoever was fortunate enough to be his widow. His sister had smiled at this, her fine, soft smile, and even Heinie himself had been obliged to laugh though he cared little about jokes concerning his somewhat solemn being; and he had married the bright-cheeked, shining-eyed, full-figured, not over-intelligent young Croatian of his desire, Irma Milanovics, and they had had three sons in the four years he lived to be her husband. It made him the father of eleven children, all living at the time of the outbreak of the war, together with an adopted daughter, the child of a dead friend,--(one more, it couldn't matter where there were so many). He had always enjoyed the patriarchal feeling which would come over him as he sat at that big oval table, serving the most generous of portions, or when out buying objects by the half-dozen or dozen. In many other ways, too, that numerous, good-looking family had flattered his persistent paternity. Two sons had been lost in the war, one last seen at the fall of the Fortress of Prszmysl, then traced to a prison camp in Siberia. After two years a card came through the Red Cross informing them of his death from typhus. The other had been killed in the last mad scuttle across the Piave. A daughter, too, had died of a wasting malady in the winter of 1915 after the death of her lover at the taking of Schabatz from the Serbs that first August of the war. But there were still eight of them in the thick of the fight for survival in post-war Vienna. Irma's three boys, nine, eleven and twelve years of age were not yet ready for the combat, but all the others were in it for victory or death.