"You are certain?"
"Two men have died so that the knowledge might be mine."
"I should imagine he would keep it in the deposit box of a bank where he could get at it quickly."
"Banks can be broken into easier far than his strong room. He lives, despite the changes wrought by the war, in a style almost feudal. He owns and controls twenty square miles of the country where his home is. What chance, I ask you, has a stranger of getting near without incurring suspicion. There are many men who can speak German or French like natives but Hungarian is a different matter, a non-Aryan tongue."
"It should be done from the inside," Trent mused.
"One of them was," the earl told him, "the man who tried was skillful, adroit and courageous. He had flirted with death a hundred times, just as you have done Mr. Trent, but they set a trap for him there which a fool would have passed by; a trap so skillfully baited that only a clever man would have tried to use it to further his cause. Yet he failed. You have no idea of the household at that fantastic castle in the mountains. You have no idea of the imperious temper and power of the man who owns it, the multitude of servitors who would kill did he but suggest it, the motley company he entertains there."
This mention of many visitors interested Trent.
"He entertains a great deal then?"
"Only those he knows, men and women. The life there as reported to me reads like a chronicle of medieval days."