"He'd laid by money enough to start a little beer garden. The older sister soon went out to service. This one insisted on going to school. But she helped in the beer garden between whiles. Made a friend of one of the habitués, a fiddler in the local band. She sang for the beer garden customers, and they threw her dimes. At fourteen she got an engagement at the little German theater. She sent home the passage money for a brother. Instead of putting him to a trade, she put him to school. This girl of fifteen. The next year she sent for another brother. Même jeu. Oh, she's been very decent to her family. But the voice of great souls appears always to have been Miss Schwarz's undoing. Her voice was unformed. She forced it. Broke it. At eighteen an end to hopes of great operatic career. A year or so later she went on the stage. Played in German a couple of seasons. Graduated into English. Then there's a goodish interval which we haven't yet filled. Nearly six years, I make it. When she next comes to the surface, she had fallen in with Pforzheim at Washington, and was falling out with him in Paris. The Brussels' Secret Service had employed him on that Duc de Berry case. She did the work. Pforzheim, as usual, got the credit, and naturally most of the cash. She needs an awful lot to keep her going—this woman. They quarreled over the amount. She washed her hands of the job and of him, and back she goes to America. Out of the glare and excitement of Paris and a partnership in Pforzheim's plottings, to—what do you suppose? To teach music, of all things! In San Francisco, of all places! In a private family!" Singleton laughed. "These Ellises!" He nodded at Miss Anne's letters. "Again and again we've traced Greta Schwarz doing this and that for the International Bureau, being successful and well paid, and suddenly chucking the whole thing and going back to respectability and dullness. An inversion of the desire of the moth for the flame. The desire of the butterfly to labor, to store honey and esteem!"
Napier brought him back to the point. "Now that you've landed Pforzheim, any more use for her?"
"None on earth."
"But if in this case she's been only Pforzheim's tool, is the evidence enough—?"
Singleton nodded.
"Her neck's in the noose. You don't believe her neck's in the noose?"
The smile was ugly. It gave a certain sportsman's pleasure to Napier's reply.
"She's a very clever person—is Miss von Schwarzenberg."
"Well, my experience with all these people," returned Singleton, easily, "is that the cleverest do the rashest things. Who takes care of Pforzheim's tracery of fortifications? Pforzheim? Not he. This woman, with twice his wits. And what do you think of her setting down in that idiotic diary full reports of conversations among officials? Some at dinner, some overheard. And do you think Number Eighteen—that is Pforzheim—do you think he was going to run the risk of having code messages traced to him? Not a bit of it. The compromising messages come to her."
"How do you know?"