"I'd give a good deal to know. Apparently she's an ex-actress. At least, that's what her friends tell me. Time was too, they say, when she was very communicative and friendly. Now she tells no one of her plans or of her activities. And strangely enough, my path has crossed hers twice in places where only the agents of Imperial Germany could consistently be. She was at the fire tonight." "At the fire?" Bailey stared. "Are you sure?" "I have a good pair of eyes." said Harrison Grant, "I saw her there--not fifty feet away. I chased her--but a train cut me off." Bailey raised a hand to his hat. "I'll see what I can find out," he said quietly and left the building. But Grant continued to stand there, staring at the floor--wondering--wondering what this woman whom circumstance again and again gave the accusation of being a German spy, could have played in this latest evidence of Imperial Germany's ghoulish cruelty! CHAPTER V. "THE STRIKE BREEDERS" It was late at night. In his private office, Harrison Grant was puzzling over a report by Tom Bailey, an operative, announcing a condition rather unpleasant for the president of the Criminology Club. For the letter simply announced: "Harrison Grant, Criminology Club. Dear Sir: Beg to report that all I can learn about Miss Dixie Mason is that she is almost constantly in the company of the Germans, particularly Heinric von Lertz. Yours truly, Bailey, Operative." Thereby, for Harrison Grant, a mystery remained unsolved, a mystery which nettled him, angered him. It had been weeks--months--since he had first met Dixie Mason, months in which he had constantly seen her in suspicious surroundings--yet never in a position to betray her. Once he had even gone so far as to send a special report on her to Chief Flynn--a report which the Chief naturally received with a hidden smile and the announcement that he would have the affair investigated from his office, that Grant allow her activities to pass unnoticed in the chase for bigger game. But when a man is hovering between love and suspicion, he is not likely to allow every opportunity to slip. Hence the private investigation which Grant had ordered to be made by his operative, Bailey, with the resultant report. Half angrily Harrison Grant filed the report in his cabinet and returned to his desk, moody, silent---- Not knowing, of course, that in a faraway part of the city, Dixie Mason was reading for the twentieth time, an excerpt from the evening paper containing an interview with Harrison Grant, and musing over the visualized features of the man she loved, brought before her eyes by the cold, staring type of the interview. Naturally Grant could not know that--and Dixie could not tell him the secrets that she must tell no one, the secrets that she must hold against the inclinations of her heart, that the battle against Imperial Germany might be won.