I tossed up my hands with a smile. The position was impossible.

"Hadn't you better fetch your trunks from the station, Paul?" asked Bessie.

"I'm afraid there's nothing in them that will solve this puzzle."

"At any rate you will not go home now," she retorted meaningly.  "And while you go for them, Althea and I can talk things over. I have made up my mind. She must, of course, stay with us for the time."

"No, no," protested Althea. I rose, delighted at the idea.

"We shall have everything settled by the time you're back, Paul."

"There's Gretchen, remember," I replied as I went out of the room.

I walked to the station and started to think things over, but there was one thought which for the time crowded out all others. Althea was not in love with the Prince! Thank Heaven for that. And compared with that, nothing mattered. I would find some way out of the tangle, and in the meantime--well, I could hope again. And then I began dreaming and planning with the sanguine vanity of a man very much in love and once more able to hope for the best.

Dormund was still at the station, and met me as I entered.  "Ah, Herr Bastable, going on your journey after all?"

"Not to-night. I don't travel at night if I can help it."

"Well that is perhaps as well. It will give you more time. All passports have to be viséd afresh. But of course I can see to that for you, if you like."

"Why's that? Anything happened?"

"It would interest you if you were still on your paper. Trouble with those cursed Poles again. A plot to rob one of the Imperial couriers of his papers. We had news from Koln and prevented it; but some of the scoundrels are known to be here in Berlin, and we are watching for them. If we were to behead a few of them it would save a lot of trouble."

"There would be so many less to make the trouble, anyway," I replied carelessly.  "Do you know the people in it?"

"I know who is at the bottom of it, and so do you; for you have written about him often enough. That Baron von Ringheim. There's no proof, of course; there never is; but proof or no proof, I'd put him in safe keeping if I had my way. He's the most dangerous man in Europe to our 

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