Frau Reitschel, the young wife of the famous Anton Reitschel of Constantinople, had, the journal reported, been seized by a sudden and somewhat mysterious illness on the night prior to the Emperor's departure from the Schloss Langenberg, and though His Majesty had graciously left his own physician behind to attend her, the unfortunate lady had developed insanity to such a hopeless degree that it had been necessary to confine her in the Rosenau private asylum at Coburg.
In a second I realized how the dancing-mistress and the mental specialist from Augsburg had been the tools of the Emperor. That "mysterious illness," developing into madness, was surely not the result of any natural cause, but had been deliberately planned and executed by means of a hypodermic syringe, in order that the woman who had learnt the secret of the Emperor's double cunning in the Near East should be for ever immured in a madhouse.
Outside the trio responsible for the cruel and dastardly act, I alone knew the truth how, by the Emperor's drastic action, he had prevented the secret of his chicanery leaking out to the Powers.
Poor Madame Reitschel! She died early in 1913, a raving lunatic. Her devoted husband, having served the Emperor's purpose, had been recalled to Berlin, where, bereft of the Kaiser's favour, he predeceased her by about six months, broken-hearted, but in utter ignorance of that foul plot carried out under his very nose and in his own castle.
SECRET NUMBER FIVE
THE GIRL WHO KNEW THE CROWN-PRINCE'S SECRET
Late on the night of November 18th, 1912, I was busily at work in the Crown-Prince's room—that cosy apartment of which I possessed the key—at the Marble Palace at Potsdam.
I, as His Imperial Highness's personal-adjutant, had been travelling all day with him from Cologne to Berlin. We had done a tour of military inspections in Westphalia, and, as usual, "Willie's" conduct, as became the heir-apparent of the psalm-singing All-Highest One, had not been exactly exemplary.
With his slant eyes and sarcastic grin he openly defied the Emperor, and frequently referred to him to his intimates as "a hoary old hypocrite"—the truth of which recent events have surely proved.