I first obtained employment in a marine engineering
shop at Southampton, joined a trade union, attended Socialist
meetings--I, a member of one of the oldest families in Trieste. Though
a Catholic, I bent my knee in the English Church, and this was not
difficult, for I had always attended service in the chapel at
Blundell's. To you, my friend, I can say this, for you are of some
strange sect which consigns to the lowest Hell both Catholics and
Anglicans alike. Your Heaven will be a small place. From Southampton I
went to the torpedo training-ship _Vernon_. Again I had no difficulty.
I was a workman of skill and intelligence. I was there for more than
two years, learning all your secrets, and storing them in my mind for
the benefit of my own Service at home.

It was at Portsmouth that there came to me the great temptation of my
life, for I fell in love, not as you colder people do, but as a
Latin of the warm South. She was an English girl of good, if
undistinguished, family. Though in my hours of duty I belonged to that
you call the 'working classes,' I was well off, and lived in private
the life of my own class. I had double the pay of my rank, an
allowance from my father, and my wages, which were not small. There
were many English families in Portsmouth and Southsea who were
graciously pleased to recognise that John Trehayne, trade unionist,
and weekly wage-earning workman, was a gentleman by birth and
breeding. In any foreign port I should have been under police
supervision as a person eminently to be suspected; in Portsmouth I was
accepted without question for what I gave myself out to be--a
gentleman who wished to learn his business from the bottom upwards. I
will say nothing of the lady of my heart except that I loved her
passionately, and should have married her--aye, and become an
Englishman in fact, casting off my own, country--if War had not blown
my ignoble plans to shatters. There was nothing ignoble in my love,
for she was a queen among women, but in myself for permitting the hot
blood of youth to blind my eyes to the duty claimed of me by my
country. When war became imminent, I was not recalled, as I had hoped
to be, since I wished to fight afloat as became my rank and family. I
was ordered to take such steps as most effectively aided me to observe
the English plans and preparations, and to report when possible to
Vienna. In other words, I was ordered to act in your midst as a
special intelligence officer-