On that wintry night, Ella Drost—known to the theatre-going public as Stella Steele, the great revue artiste whose picture postcards were everywhere—sat in that stuffy, dingy little restaurant in Soho, sipping a glass of its pseudo-Danish lager, and laughing with the two unpresentable men before her.

Outside the unpretentious little place was written up the single word “Restaurant.” Its proprietor a big, full-blooded, fair-bearded son of the Fatherland, had kept it for twenty years, and it had been the evening rendezvous of working-class Germans—waiters, bakers, clerks, coiffeurs, jewellers, and such-like.

Here one could still revel in Teuton delicacies, beer brewed in Hamburg, but declared to be “Danish,” the succulent German liver sausage, the sausage of Frankfort—boiled in pairs of course—the palatable sauerkraut with the black sour bread of the Fatherland to match.

“I wish you could get rid of Kennedy,” said Ortmann, as he again, in confidence, bent across the table towards Ella’s father. “I believe she’s in collusion with him.”

“No,” laughed the elder man, “I can’t believe that. Ella is too good a daughter of the Fatherland.” He was one of Germany’s chief agents in England, and had much money in secret at his command.

Ortmann screwed up his eyes and pursed his lips. He was a shrewd, clever man, and very difficult to deceive.

“Money is at stake, my dear Drost,” he whispered very slowly—“big money. But there is love also. And I believe—nay, I’m sure—that Kennedy loves her.”

“Bah! utterly ridiculous!” cried her father. “I don’t believe that for a single moment. She’s only fooling him, as she has fooled all the others.”

“All right. But I’ve watched. You have not,” was the cold reply.

From time to time the attractive Ella, on her part, glanced across at her father, who was whispering with his overdressed companion, and, to the keen observer, it would have been apparent that she was only smoking and gossiping with that pair of low-bred foreigners for distinct purposes of her own.

The truth was that, with her woman’s instinct, feminine cleverness and ingenuity, she, being filled with the enthusiasm of affection for her aviator-lover, was playing a fiercely desperate part as a staunch and patriotic daughter of Great Britain.

The hour was late. She had hurried from the theatre in a 

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