THE SECRET SPRING

BY

PIERRE BENOIT

NEW YORK

DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY

1920

CONTENTS

 A FOREWORD PROLOGUE CHAPTER I CHAPTER II CHAPTER III CHAPTER IV CHAPTER V CHAPTER VI CHAPTER VII CHAPTER VIII EPILOGUE

 A FOREWORD

 Long have I hesitated to give back to Life the legacy left me by Death. But at last, reflecting that Lieutenant Vignerte and She whom he loved have vanished into the eternal shades, I have decided that there is no longer any reason to keep silence about the tragic events staged in the German court of Lautenburg-Detmold in the months immediately preceding the Great War. 

P. B.

 PROLOGUE

 "Unpile Arms!" 

 Of its own motion and by that force of habit which makes the word of command superfluous, the dark mass of the company rose and formed fours to the right. 

 The darkness was falling, cold and cruel, slashed with long liquid streaks. It had been raining all day. In the middle of the clearing a grey-green sky looked up at us from shadowy pools. 

 An order rang out: "Quick March!" The little body moved off. I was at the head. At the edge of the wood was a country-house, some eighteenth-century fantasy; two or three shells had been enough to demolish the wings. The chandeliers of the big ground-floor room, multiplied in its mirrors and sparkling through its tall windows, enhanced the sinister blackness of the falling October night. 

 Five or six shadowy 

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