“I think I have been expected,” she replied.

“You come alone?”

“I am alone.”

“I am Countess Anna von Lenkenstein; one of the guests of the castle.”

“My message is to the Countess Anna.”

“You have a message?”

Vittoria lifted the embroidered cigar-case.  Countess Anna snatched it from her hand.

“What does this mean?  Is it insolence?  Have the kindness, if you please, not to address me in enigmas.  Do you”—­Anna was deadly pale as she turned the cigarcase from side to side—­“do you imagine that I smoke, ‘par hasard?’” She tried to laugh off her intemperate manner of speech; the laugh broke at sight of a blood-mark on one corner of the case; she started and said earnestly, “I beg you to let me hear what the meaning of this may be?”

“He lies in the Ultenthal, wounded; and his wish was that I should deliver it to you.”  Vittoria spoke as gently as the harsh tidings would allow.

“Wounded?  My God! my God!” Anna cried in her own language.  “Wounded?- in the breast, then!  He carried it in his breast.  Wounded by what? by what?”

“I can tell you no more.”

“Wounded by whom?”

“It was an honourable duel.”

“Are you afraid to tell me he has been assassinated?”

“It was an honourable duel.”

“None could match him with the sword.”

“His enemy had nothing but a dagger.”

“Who was his enemy?”

“It is no secret, but I must leave him to say.”

“You were a witness of the fight?”

“I saw it all.”

“The man was one of your party!

“Ah!” exclaimed Vittoria, “lose no time with me, Countess Anna, go to him at once, for though he lived when I left him, he was bleeding; I cannot say that he was not dying, and he has not a friend near.”

Anna murmured like one overborne by calamity.  “My brother struck down one day—­he the next!” She covered her face a moment, and unclosed it to explain that she wept for her brother, who had been murdered, stabbed in Bologna.

“Was it Count Ammiani who did this?” she asked passionately.

Vittoria shook her head; she was divining a dreadful thing in relation to the death of Count Paul.

“It was not?” said Anna.  “They had a misunderstanding, I know.  But you tell me the man fought with a dagger.  It could not be Count Ammiani.  The dagger is an assassin’s weapon, and there are men of honour in Italy still.”

She called to a servant in the castle-yard, and sent him down with orders to stop the soldier Wilhelm.