The Maharajah was at that time an engaging and eccentric old gentleman, who had been an uncompromising opponent of the English during his youth in India, and was now practically an exile, spending most of his time in planning futile conspiracies against the British Government, which he hated, and making friends with Englishmen toward whom he had no animosity whatever. He was especially well disposed toward my diplomatic friend, and the two spent many a riotous evening together over the chess board, at which the Maharajah was invariably successful. Meanwhile I made various plans and cultivated the acquaintance of the Rajah’s secretary. He was a Bengali, who might well have stepped out of Kipling, so far as his manner went. In character the resemblance was not so close. I happened to know that he was paid a comfortable amount yearly by the British Government, to keep them informed of the Rajah’s movements; and I also happened to know that the German Government paid him a more comfortable amount for the privilege of deciding just what the British Government should learn. (I have often wondered whether he shared the proceeds with the Maharajah, and whether even he knew for whom he was really working.) The secretary, I decided, might be of use to me. As it happened, it was the secretary who unwittingly suggested the method by which I finally gained my object. It was he who commented upon the diplomat’s intense interest in the Maharajah’s seraglio, giving me a clue to the character of the Englishman, which was of distinct service. And it was he who suggested one evening that the three of us—for the Maharajah was ill at the time—should attend a performance of the circus in which my friends, the Bishops, were playing. You foresee the end, no doubt. The diplomat, with his too susceptible nature, was infatuated by Mlle. Bishop’s beauty and skill. He wished to meet her, and I, who obligingly confessed that I had had some transactions with her father, undertook to secure the lady’s permission to present him to her. I did secure it, of course, although not without considerable opposition on the part of all three of the family; for circus people are very straight-laced. However, by severely straining my purse and my imagination, I convinced them that they would be doing both a friendly and a profitable act, by participating in the little drama that I had planned. Eventually they consented to aid me in discomfiting the diplomat, whom I represented as having in his possession some legal papers that really belonged to me, although I could not prove my claim to them.