seeks
everywhere for an opportunity to leave before the appointed time.
His health is all right. He has had a hint from Vienna that there
has been a leakage. His special mission only reached Paris this
morning. The President is in the country and their audience is not
fixed until to-morrow. Rawson will go over with a copy of these
papers and a dispatch from His Majesty by the nine o'clock train.
It is not often that we have had the chance of such a 'coup' as
this."

He drew his chief a few steps away. They whispered together for
several moments. When they returned, the Foreign Minister rang
the bell again for his secretary.

"Anthony," he said, "Sir James and I will be leaving in a few
minutes for Windsor. Go round yourself to General Hamilton,
telephone to Aldershot for Lord Neville, and call round at the
Admiralty Board for Sir John Harrison. Tell them all to be here
at ten o'clock tonight. If I am not back, they must wait. If
either of them have royal commands, you need only repeat the
word 'Finisterre.' They will understand."

The young man once more withdrew. The Prime Minister turned
back to the papers.

"It will be worth a great deal," he remarked, with a grim smile,
"to see His Majesty's face when he reads this."

"It would be worth a great deal more," his fellow statesman
answered dryly, "to be with his August cousin at the interview
which will follow. A month ago, the thought that war might come
under our administration was a continual terror to me. To-day
things are entirely different. To-day it really seems that if
war does come, it may be the most glorious happening for England
of this century. You saw the last report from Kiel?"

Sir James nodded.

"There isn't a battleship or a cruiser worth a snap of the fingers
south of the German Ocean," his colleague continued earnestly.
"They are cooped up--safe enough, they think--under the shelter
of their fortifications. Hamilton has another idea. Between you
and me, Sir James, so have I. I tell you," he went on, in a
deeper and more passionate tone, "it's like the passing of a
terrible nightmare--this. We have had ten years of panic, of
nervous fears of a German invasion, and no one knows more than you
and I, Sir James, how much cause we have had for those fears. It
will seem strange if, after all, history has to write that chapter
differently."

The secretary re-entered and announced the result of his telephone
interview with t