Among the few whose lives and activities seemed to be unaffected by the stifling atmosphere, which depressed all spirits, was also Andrea Delfin. The morning after the crime, he had, like all the other secret spies, been interrogated by the successor of that unfortunate secretary who had put him on the payroll, concerning his observations at the hour of the crime, and had presented him the fairy-tale of a trip to the lido, on which he had the intention to investigate how the fisherman thought about all this. What he could tell them about what was going on in the hotel of the Austrian ambassador and the palace of the countess - meaningless facts, which the tribunal already knew for a long time - at least proved his zeal to familiarise himself with his new task. His friend Samuele did not fail to inform against the striking familiarity he had found between the man from Brescia and the secretary of the embassy. Calmly, Andrea explained himself, and the old acquaintance from Riva could only be advantageous for the intentions of the tribunal.
Thus, almost no day passed by, when he would not, after he was done with his work for the notary, call on his German friend, to whom, being cut off from other company, the conversations with the grave man, clouded by secret grief, became, by and by, a necessity. He had developed an unlimited trust in Andrea, and when he avoided political topics with him, it was more because he could not hope that they would understand each other on account of their different nationalities, than for a concern that Andrea might abuse his openness. He even told him with a laughing face that he had been warned against him being a spy of the tribunal. The carelessness with which he crossed the shunned threshold of the foreign ambassador every day would, of course, catch people's attention.
"I'm no nobile," replied Andrea with a calm face. "The ten men will realise that I don't seek any diplomatic connections here; they didn't even think me worthy of a warning up to now. But I've come to like you, and it would pain me to forgo forcing my unpleasant company on you from time to time, for I'm a perfectly lonely man. Even my kind landlady, who in the past used to shorten the time for me with her proverbs for an hour or so, doesn't enter my room any more. She's ill, and what made her ill is Venice and pale shadows haunting this city."
This was indeed true. After the second assault against the inquisition of the state, Signora Giovanna had been walking around in deep thoughts for one day, and as the night fell, an ever growing excitement had come upon her. She was now firmly convinced that her Orso's spirit had been the perpetrator; for only a bodiless shadow would be able to escape for a second time the thousand spying eyes which were guarding Venice. She put on her best clothes and decided, since she was expecting nothing less than a visit of her departed husband, to be ready to receive him, spending the entire night at the top of the stairs. In a touching confusion of these concepts, she had prepared a favourite dish of her husband, laid the table with three armchairs by its side, and could not be persuaded to eat a bite of it herself. In this state, she sat awake for the larger part of the night. Only after the small lamp in the corridor had gone out, Marietta, calling Andrea to her aid, succeeded in bringing the poor woman back to her room and to bed. A fever broke out, not dangerous, but strong enough to render her unconscious for several hours a day. Andrea watched all of this with deep sympathy, and the moving words the ill woman uttered in her delusions tormented him a lot. He had to admit to himself that he was to blame for the confusion of this good soul, and Marietta's sad looks depressed him more heavily than all the bloody secrets he carried around with him.
With this burden, Andrea strolled past the Doges' Palace one afternoon and, for a long time, stood by the narrow canal which flows along under the high arch of the Bridge of Sighs. Whenever he started to waver in his decisions and he began to doubt in the moral justification of the office of a judge which he had taken on, he fled to this place and confirmed his determination by looking at these ancient walls, behind which thousands of victims of an irresponsible power had sighed and gnashed their teeth, believing in the righteousness and the necessity of his mission.
The sun shone with blinding rays through the mists of September, rising up from the water. This quay, which had at other times been swarming with people, was unsettlingly quiet. The gloomy looks of the soldiers, marching noisily up and down under the arcades of the palace, were liable to scare away the loud cheerfulness of the people passing by. Andrea could hear clearly that from a gondola, which was just arriving at the Piazzetta, his name had been called. He recognised his friend, the secretary of the ambassador from Vienna.
"Do you've got time?" the young man called out at him, "If so, come on board for a while, and join me for a stretch of my way. I'm in a hurry, but would still like to talk to you once more."
Andrea entered the gondola, and the other man shook his hand particularly cordially. "I'm very happy, my dear Andrea that I happened to meet you here. I would have disliked leaving you without a farewell, and yet, I didn't dare to visit you or to sent for you, since this would undoubtedly have caught someone's attention."
"You're taking a journey?" Andrea asked almost perplexed.
"I guess, I'll have to. Here, read this letter from my dear mother, and tell me whether I'm still allowed to hesitate after this."