“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.
“Are you mad, Kranz? Do you take me for an imbecile old woman? Am I feeble-minded—do I look feeble-minded—that you should dare to—to play such a trick upon me?” He was obviously working himself up into one of his official rages. “You—you tell me that you have an infallible means for obtaining secret information, no matter how hidden. You persuade me to come and test it—me! I give you credit for your impudence!—and this is what it is!” He almost choked with offended dignity. “Be careful, Kranz! You have traded this once upon your record with us—you will never do it again! To bring me—me!—to this absurdity!—to expect me to listen to the hypnotic ravings of that idiot girl! I wonder you didn’t offer me crystal-gazing!”
“But, Excellenz——!”
The old man waved a hand at him.
“My dear Kranz,” he said, dropping suddenly into a tone of tolerant contempt. “I forgive you this once. I daresay you have been the victim of a genuine hallucination. You would not have dared else.—You don’t drug, do you?” The question was asked with a disconcertingly sudden sharpness. The younger man made a gesture of emphatic denial, defying the piercing gray eyes that probed him. The old man grunted. “Keep your sanity, Kranz—or the Bureau will lose a valued servant. Drop this nonsense. I know what I am talking about—I studied psychology under Wundt of Jena. The whole thing is a hallucination—the raving of the dream-self released from control—dummes Zeug!—Give me my coat!”
“Excellenz, I implore you!”
The old man looked at him with a snarl of savage mockery.
“Don’t waste any more of my time, Kranz! Look at her—is it even probable that an imbecile creature like that can be of use in our business? Look at her, I say!”
He flung out a hand toward a young girl who stood with obvious reluctance in the centre of the luxuriously furnished apartment. She was perhaps eighteen but her youth had neither beauty nor charm. Her features were soft and heavy; the nose thick; the chin receding; the eyes weak and protuberant. Unmistakably, her personality was of the feeblest. Her face flooded scarlet with shame and her eyes swam with tears at this brutal insult. Yet evidently she did not dare to rush away. Only she looked beseechingly toward Kranz, like a dog who awaits a sign from its master.
His sallow face blanched. The thin lips under the dark moustache lost their curves, became a straight line.