"And, happily for her intended victim, an accident befell the sorceress, which blunted some of the arrows in her quiver of irresistible charms!"
XLVIII
"Sad, sad! I had not heard. How did it happen?" asked Moltke, elevating his hairless brows inquiringly.
"Briefly, the affair, as its details have reached me, sums up in this way: Straz, the Roumanian agent of the Emperor Napoleon, having performed his mission to Prince Antony of Hohenzollern, met Madame de Bayard at a Sigmaringen hotel.... She is as clever and light-fingered as she is, or was, beautiful——'
"I know, I know!" said Moltke. "She sucked Straz dry of his store of Imperial secrets, but how, I did not hear from Your Excellency."
Returned the Chancellor:
"By drugging him—or so he vows!—she obtained those copies of his instructions from the Emperor (with copies of his copies of the telegrams sent by Prince Antony)—which I was privileged to show you later on. Subsequently, and in floods of artificial tears, she awakened her victim, declaring she must return that instant to Berlin. Which she did—a special engine having been kept under steam at the Sigmaringen railway station—in time to place the papers in the hands for which they were destined. The exquisite point of the jest is that Straz accompanied her—subsequently discovering how roundly he had been befooled! But upon this point I am not certain.... I only argue from the premises that when Delilah was subsequently found gagged, half-strangled, and robbed in her bedroom at the hotel where she and her Roumanian had put up—Straz—who had vanished—was the perpetrator of what Madame has since termed 'a mysterious outrage.'"
"He took the money?" Moltke queried.
"Undoubtedly he took the money, which Bucher had paid her a few hours previously. Twenty thousand marks in honest Prussian bank-notes. Some of them Straz changed before he left Berlin. He is now here in France, and that is all I care to know of him at present. But in the eyes of every man she now encounters, Madame will read something that will keep her animosity alive."