He nodded. “To make the story short, I found out where they had gone. My flights to Germany have been made for this purpose. Don’t you see? The papers came into the hands of the Emperor of Germany and he was plannin’ to have ’em sent to the President of the French Republic—England’s ally. It wouldn’t do, you know, to have such papers at such a time fall into the hands of France. Hardly a credit to English diplomacy. What? Might even result in a new entente.”
“But where were the papers in the meanwhile?” she asked.
“That is what took me so bally long to find out. After many hunts away from Windenberg at night, I traced ’em to a Socialist by the name of Gottschalk at Schöndorf, who had received ’em from a pensioner of the Imperial Forest Service, one of the attendants at the huntin’ lodge where the conference was held. Whether he found ’em or stole ’em I don’t know, but I frightened him and he confessed. I was on the very point of stealing ’em from Gottschalk when I found out that he had been writin’ to the Wilhelmstrasse, and when I tried to get ’em they were gone. If I’d got ’em then, you would not be here, Doris, and I——”
“But how did you learn what the Wilhelmstrasse proposed to do with them?”
“Oh, that was quite clear. The English Foreign Office has been badly frightened and has used every effort with its secret agents in Berlin to get that information. It reached London the other day. And just before I left Scotland I knew the job was to be given to General von Stromberg. The rest was Kismet—the fortune of war—a jolly good piece of luck! Lindberg overheard through the microphone von Stromberg givin’ instructions to Wentz—so that His Excellency’s own weapons were turned against him. I was goin’ to waylay Wentz on the way to France, but circumstances prevented——”
“It was I, Cyril,” she broke in pleadingly. “I didn’t know. I betrayed you.”
“A trick,” he laughed, “invented in the Rameses family—but still useful.”
“He frightened me,” she stammered. “I believed the message signed ‘Maxwell’ genuine.”
“Not Maxwell,” he said gravely, “for Maxwell—a sore spot since the war began in the side of the War Office—Maxwell is dead.”
“You——?” she exclaimed fearfully.