And if another King had not kept a diary he might have kept his throne. And if both he and a certain young diplomat, whose name I think it best to forget, had not had a common weakness for pretty faces, Germany would have lost an opportunity to gain some information that was more or less useful to her, an actress whose name you all know would never have become internationally famous, and this book would have lost an amusing little comedy of coincidences. All of which sounds like romance and is—merely the truth. I had spent two uneventful years at Gross Lichterfelde at the time the comedy began; two years of study in which I had acquired some knowledge and a great weariness of routine, of hard work unpunctuated by any element of adventure. Of late it had almost seemed as if, after all, it was planned that I should become merely one of the vast army of officers that Gross Lichterfelde and similar schools were yearly turning out. For such a fate, as you can imagine, I had little liking. Consequently I was far from displeased when one day I received a characteristically brief note from my old tutor, asking me to call upon him. Still more was I elated when, the next day, he informed me that I had enough of books for the time being, and that he thought a little practical experience would be good for me. A vacation, I might call it, if I wished—with a trifle of detective work thrown in. H’m. I was not so delighted with that prospect, and when the details of the “vacation” were explained to me, I was strongly tempted to say no to the entire proposition. But one does not say no to my old tutor. And so, in the course of a week, I found myself spending my evenings in the _Café de l’Europe_ in Geneva, bound on a still hunt for Russian revolutionists. Russia, at this time, had not quite recovered from the fright she received in 1905 and 1906, when, as you will remember, popular discontent with the government had assumed very serious proportions. “Bloody Sunday,” and the riots and strikes that followed it, were far in the past now, it is true, but they were still well remembered. And although most of the known revolutionary leaders had been disposed of in one way or another, there were still a few of them, as well as a large number of their followers, wandering in odd corners of Europe. These it was thought best to get rid of; and Russian agents promptly began ferreting them out. And Germany—always less unfriendly to the Romanoffs than has appeared on the surface—lent a helping hand. So it happened that on a particular night in December of 1909, I sat in the _Café de l’Europe_, bitterly detesting the work I had in hand, yet inconsistently wishing that something would turn up. I had no idea at the moment of what I should do next. Chance rumor had led me to Geneva, and I was largely depending upon chance for further developments.