"But at present," Norgate ventured, "there is no Balkan Crisis."
The Comtesse looked at him lazily out of the corners of her sleepy eyes.
"Is there not?" she asked simply. "I have been away from Italy for a week or so, and Andrea trusts nothing to letters. Yesterday I had a dispatch begging me to return. I go to-morrow morning. I do not know whether it is because of the pressure of affairs, or because he wearies himself a little without me."
"One might easily imagine the latter," Norgate remarked. "But is it indeed any secret to you that there is a great feeling of uneasiness throughout the Continent, an extraordinary state of animation, a bustle, although a secret bustle, of preparation in Germany?"
"I have heard rumours of this," the Comtesse confessed.
"When one bears these things in mind and looks a little into the future," Norgate continued, "one might easily believe that the reply to that still unanswered letter of the Kaiser's might well become historical."
"You would like me, would you not," she asked, "to tell you what that reply will most certainly be?"
"Very much!"
"You are an Englishman," she remarked thoughtfully, "and intriguing with
Anna. I fear that I do not understand the position."
"Must you understand it?"