"His wife's diary?"
"Yes."
The major burst into an oath:
"May I be damned for everlasting! One should burn everything in those cases. Oh, if I hadn't indulged that foolish curiosity! . . . And next?"
"Oh, hardly anything, Excellenz! A bit of a shell, yes, a little bit of a shell; but I must say that it looked to me very like the splinter which you ordered me to drive into the wall of the lodge, after sticking some of Élisabeth's hair to it. What do you think of that, Excellenz?"
The major stamped his foot with anger and let fly a new string of oaths and anathemas at the head of Paul Delroze.
"What do you think of that?" repeated the spy.
"You are right," cried the major. "His wife's diary will have given that cursed Frenchman a glimpse of the truth; and that piece of shell in his possession is a proof to him that his wife is perhaps still alive, which is the one thing I wanted to avoid. We shall never get rid of him now!" His rage seemed to increase. "Oh, Karl, he makes me sick and tired! He and his street-boy of a brother-in-law, what a pair of swankers! By God, I did think that you had rid me of them the night when we came back to their room at the château and found their names written on the wall! And you can understand that they won't let things rest, now that they know the girl isn't dead! They will look for her. They will find her. And, as she knows all our secrets . . . ! You ought to have made away with her, Karl!"
"And the prince?" chuckled the spy.
"Conrad is an ass! The whole of that family will bring us ill-luck and first of all to him who was fool enough to fall in love with that hussy. You ought to have made away with her at once, Karl—I told you—and not to have waited for the prince's return."