Truly the irony of circumstances! If one went back far enough, one might find that the determining factor of my disgrace was the quarrel of a nurse and her lover which made her take the child another walk than usual and pick up infection. Dash it all! you might even find that it was a spot on her nose that made her do so, as she didn't want to meet him when not looking at her best! But that way madness lies. Whatever the original cause--I went: and in due course met the Comtesse. She gave me a couple of dances, and I found that she, too, had booked her passage on the _Astoria_. I met very few people I knew, and having found it the usual boring stunt, I decided to get a glass of champagne and a sandwich and then retire to bed. I took them along to a small alcove where I could smoke a cigarette in peace, and sat down. It was as I sat down that I heard from behind a curtain which completely screened me from view, the words "English Army" spoken in German. And the voice was the voice of the Comtesse. Nothing very strange in the words you say, seeing that she spoke German, as well as several other languages, fluently. Perhaps not--but you know what my ideas used to be--how I was obsessed with the spy theory: at any rate, I listened. I listened for a quarter of an hour, and then I got my coat and went home--went home to try and see a way through just about the toughest proposition I'd ever been up against. For the Comtesse--Ginger Bathurst's idolised wife--was hand in glove with the German Secret Service. She was a spy, not of the wireless installation up the chimney type, not of the document-stealing type, but of a very much more dangerous type than either, the type it is almost impossible to incriminate. I can't remember the conversation I overheard exactly, I cannot give it to you word for word, but I will give you the substance of it. Her companion was von Basel's chief--a typical Prussian officer of the most overbearing description. "How goes it with you, Comtesse?" he asked her, and I heard the scrape of a match as he lit a cigarette. "Well, Baron, very well." "They do not suspect?" "Not an atom. The question has never been raised even as to my national sympathies, except once, and then the suggestion--not forced or emphasised in any way--that, as the child of a family who had lost everything in the '70 war, my sympathies were not hard to discover, was quite sufficient. That was at the time of the Agadir crisis." "And you do not desire revanche?" "My dear man, I desire money. My husband with his pay and private income has hardly enough to dress me on." "But, dear lady, why, if I may ask, did you marry him? With so many others for her choice, surely the Comtesse de Grecin could have commanded the world?"