“We are officially informed that the police have recently obtained knowledge of certain facts which establish beyond a doubt the motive of the brutal assault committed on the person of Miss Jane Turner. We are not authorised to say more at present than that certain startling developments are imminent.” On the way up my dear lady had initiated me into some of her views with regard to the case itself, which at the chief’s desire she had now taken entirely in hand, and also into her immediate plans, of which the above article was merely the preface. She it was who had “officially informed” the Press Association, and, needless to say, the news duly appeared in most of the London and provincial dailies. How unerring was her intuition, and how well thought out her scheme, was proved within the next four-and-twenty hours in our own little flat, when our Emily, looking somewhat important and awed, announced Her Serene Highness the Countess of Hohengebirg. H. S. H.--the conspicuous initials in the “Personal” columns of the _West of England Times_! You may imagine how I stared at the exquisite apparition--all lace and chiffon and roses--which the next moment literally swept into our office, past poor, open-mouthed Emily. Had my dear lady taken leave of her senses when she suggested that this beautiful young woman with the soft, fair hair, with the pleading blue eyes and childlike mouth, had anything to do with a brutal assault on a shop girl? The young Countess shook hands with Lady Molly and with me, and then, with a deep sigh, she sank into the comfortable chair which I was offering her. Speaking throughout with great diffidence, but always in the gentle tones of a child that knows it has been naughty, she began by explaining that she had been to Scotland Yard, where a very charming man--the chief, I presume--had been most kind and sent her hither, where he promised her she would find help and consolation in her dreadful, dreadful trouble. Encouraged by Lady Molly, she soon plunged into her narrative: a pathetic tale of her own frivolity and foolishness. She was originally Lady Muriel Wolfe-Strongham, daughter of the Duke of Weston, and when scarce out of the schoolroom had met the Grand Duke of Starkburg-Nauheim, who fell in love with her and married her. The union was a morganatic one, the Grand Duke conferring on his English wife the title of Countess of Hohengebirg and the rank of Serene Highness. It seems that, at first, the marriage was a fairly happy one, in spite of the bitter animosity of the mother and sister of the Grand Duke: the Dowager Grand Duchess holding that all English girls were loud and unwomanly, and the Princess Amalie, seeing in her brother’s marriage a serious bar to the fulfilment of her own highly ambitious matrimonial hopes.