“Because--because I want you to have it--because I feel, I do not know why, that you have protected me from something----” She stopped, puzzled by her own words. “That is absurd, I know!” she exclaimed. “But it belonged to two lovers, Herr Doctor--you, who understand love, will value it, I know. I--I feel you _ought_ to have it!” She left him standing with it. Then she turned to the other officers with her appealing little smile and bowed slightly in farewell. “_Gute Nacht, meine Herren!_” she said, and went out of the room. The doctor stared after her, his face deathly white. Suddenly his body broke and crumpled. He sank down to his knees by one of the chairs, still clasping the clock in his hands. “Marcelle!” he cried, his head bowed over his recovered love-token, his body shaking, “Marcelle! have I done right?--have I done right?” The battalion-commander touched his subordinate on the shoulder. Both tip-toed silently out of the room. FOOTNOTE: [1] “To Jules, to mark the hours of a love which will not cease when Time itself shall cease, from his Marcelle.” SECRET SERVICE “But, _Excellenz_----!” The entreaty, from such a man, was oddly and strikingly sincere. About forty years of age, sprucely dressed in a well-cut lounge suit, spats over patent boots, he was the type to be seen any day gazing rather aimlessly into the shop-windows of Piccadilly or the Rue de la Paix, the type that haunts the hotels frequented by the best society and yet is not of that society, the type that drifts behind the chairs of every gambling casino in the world. A dark moustache, carefully trimmed, curled over lips whose fine curves were unpleasantly thin and clear-cut. His complexion was sallow; his dark eyes, fixed on his companion in an accentuation of his entreaty, implored now with an expression of genuine truthfulness which was certainly not habitual to them. He gesticulated with a white and exquisitely manicured hand. “But rubbish!” The speaker was an oldish, thick-set man in evening dress. His round red face, barred with a clipped white moustache, with a pair of small gray eyes vivacious behind pince-nez, was set upon a short apoplectic neck which rucked into folds above his collar. The scalp showed pink through close-cropped white hair. He stood warming himself with his back to the fire--a very large fire for Berlin in the winter of early 1918--and glared angrily at the young man. He spoke with the irascibility of a brutal superior whose impunity is of long date and unquestioned.