The Great Prince Shan | Page 4

else to whom I can turn."
"There is no one else to whom you ought to turn, sir," the young man replied simply. "I shall be back in an hour."


CHAPTER II
Lady Maggie Trent, a stepdaughter of the Earl of Dorminster, was one of those young women who had baffled description for some years before she had commenced to take life seriously. She was neither fair nor dark, petite nor tall. No one could ever have called her nondescript, or have extolled any particular grace of form or feature. Her complexion had defied the ravages of sun and wind and that moderate indulgence in cigarettes and cocktails which the youth of her day affected. Her nose was inclined to be retroussé, her mouth tender but impudent, her grey eyes mostly veiled in expression but capable of wonderful changes. She was curled up in a chair when Nigel entered, immersed in a fashion paper. She held out her left hand, which he raised to his lips.
"Well, Nigel, dear," she exclaimed, "what do you think of my new profession?"
"I hate it," he answered frankly.
She sighed and laid down the fashion paper resignedly.
"You always did object to a woman doing anything in the least useful. Do you realise that if anything in the world can save this stupid old country, I have done it?"
"I realise that you've been running hideous risks," he replied.
She looked at him petulantly.
"What of it?" she demanded. "We all run risks when we do anything worth while."
"Not quite the sort that you have been facing."
She smiled thoughtfully.
"Do you know exactly where I have been?" she asked.
"No idea," he confessed. "What my uncle has just told me was a complete revelation, so far as I was concerned. I believed, with the rest of the world, what the newspapers announced--that you were visiting Japan and China, and afterwards the South Sea Islands, with the Wendercombes."
She smiled.
"Dad wanted to tell you," she said, "but it was I who made him promise not to. I was afraid you would be disagreeable about it. We arranged it all with the Wendercombes, but as a matter of fact I did not even start with them. For the last eight months, I have been living part of the time in Berlin and part of the time in a country house near the Black Forest."
"Alone?"
"Not a bit of it! I have been governess to the two daughters of Herr Essendorf."
"Essendorf, the President of the German Republic?"
Lady Maggie nodded.
"He isn't a bit like his pictures. He is a huge fat man and he eats a great deal too much. Oh, the horror of those meals!" she added, with a little shudder. "Think of me, dear Nigel, who never eat more than an omelette and some fruit for luncheon, compelled to sit down every day to a mittagessen! I wonder I have any digestion left at all."
"Do you mean that you were there under your own name?" he asked incredulously.
She shook her head.
"I secured some perfectly good testimonials before I left," she said. "They referred to a Miss Brown, the daughter of Prebendary Brown. I was Miss Brown."
"Great Heavens!" Nigel muttered under his breath. "You heard about Atcheson?"
She nodded.
"Poor fellow, they got him all right. You talk about thrills, Nigel," she went on. "Do you know that the last night before I left for my vacation, I actually heard that fat old Essendorf chuckling with his wife about how his clever police had laid an English spy by the heels, and telling her, also, of the papers which they had discovered and handed over. All the time the real dispatch, written by Atcheson when he was dying, was sewn into my corsets. How's that for an exciting situation?"
"It's a man's job, anyhow," Nigel declared.
She shrugged her shoulders and abandoned the personal side of the subject.
"Have you been in Germany lately, Nigel?" she enquired.
"Not for many years," he answered.
She stretched herself out upon the couch and lit a cigarette.
"The Germany of before the war of course I can't remember," she said pensively. "I imagine, however, that there was a sort of instinctive jealous dislike towards England and everything English, simply because England had had a long start in colonisation, commerce and all the rest of it. But the feeling in Germany now, although it is marvellously hidden, is something perfectly amazing. It absolutely vibrates wherever you go. The silence makes it all the more menacing. Soon after I got to Berlin, I bought a copy of the Treaty of Peace and read it. Nigel, was it necessary to have been so bitterly cruel to a beaten enemy?"
"Logically it would seem not," Nigel admitted. "Actually, we cannot put ourselves back into the spirit of those days. You must remember that it was an unprovoked war, a war engineered by Germany for the sheer