How the conjugal relations were resumed I know not. All I know is that I attended their Imperial Highnesses to the Lessing Theatre, where, in the Royal box, the Kaiser--ever eager to stifle the shortcomings of the Hohenzollerns--sat with us, though according to his engagements he should have been on his way to Düsseldorf for a great review on the morrow. But such public display allayed all rumour of his son's domestic infelicity, and both Emperor and Kronprinz smiled benignly upon the people. Early next day the Crown-Prince summoned me, in confidence, and an hour later I left on a secret mission to a certain lady whom I may call Miss Lilian Greyford--as it is not fair in certain cases in these exposures to mention actual names--daughter of an English county gentleman, who was staying at the "Kulm" at St. Moritz. Twenty-four hours afterwards I managed to see the winter-sports young lady alone in the hotel, and gave her a verbal message, together with a little package from His Imperial Highness, which, when she opened it, I found contained a souvenir in the shape of an artistic emerald pendant. With it were some scribbled lines. The girl--she was not much more than twenty--read them eagerly, and burst into a torrent of tears. Ah! my dear Le Queux, as you yourself know from your own observations, there are as many broken hearts beating beneath the corsets of ladies-in-waiting and maids-of-honour, as there are among that frantic feminine crowd striving to enter the magic circle of the Royal entourage or the women of the workaday world who pass up Unter-den-Linden on a Sunday. Phew! What a world of fevered artificiality revolves around a throne! Very soon after this incident--namely, in the early days of 1912--I found myself, as the personal-adjutant of His Imperial Highness the Crown-Prince, involved in a very strange, even inexplicable, affair. How shall I explain it? Well, the drama opened in the Emperor's Palace in Berlin on New Year's night, 1912, when, as usual, a Grand Court reception was held. The scene was one which we who revolve around the throne know so well. Court gowns, nodding plumes, gay uniforms, and glittering decorations--a vicious, tinselled, gossip-loving little world which with devilish intent sows seeds of dark suspicion or struggles for the Kaiser's favour. In the famous White Salon, with its ceiling gaudily emblazoned with the arms of the Hohenzollerns as Burgraves, Electors, Kings, Emperors, and what-not, its walls of coloured marble and gilded bronze, and its fine statues of the Prussian rulers, we had all assembled and were waiting the entrance of the Emperor. Kiderlen-Waechter--the Foreign Secretary--was standing near me, chatting with Von Jagow, slim, dark-haired and spruce. The latter, who was serving as German Ambassador in Rome, happened to be in Berlin on leave, and the pair were laughing merrily with a handsome black-haired woman whom I recognized as the Baroness Bertieri, wife of the Italian Ambassador.