," she
continued. "Long-suffering wife as she is, the stories that came
to her ears from Metz were such that she went to the Emperor and
declared that she would insist upon a divorce. There was a great
scandal. The Prince's headquarters were moved and at length I got
my release.

"I had no money. This was a detail which the Prince overlooked.
But I wanted to resume my stage work, so, with great difficulty,
through the influence of the Prince, I obtained a passport to
Holland and from there got across to England.

"I had hoped to turn my back once and for all on my connection
with the Prince. But your German Secret Service had been warned
about me. The Imperial Authorities were obviously afraid that I
might tell tales out of school. Scarcely had I arrived in London
when a man who called himself Bryan Mowbury, but who looked and
spoke like a German, came to see me and said he had been
instructed to 'look after me.' What that meant, I was soon to
discover. In a very few days I found that I was under the
supervision of your Secret Service here. In fact, Mowbury gave me
to understand that any indiscretion on my part as to my stay at
Metz would result in my immediate denunciation to the English
police as a spy.

"My friend, I had no alternative. I am not German; I am not
English; I am a Pole. I have good friends in Germany, I have good
friends in England, and their quarrels are not mine. I held my
peace about the past and submitted to the incessant watch which
Mowbury and his friends kept on my movements.

"And then one day I had a letter. It was from Count Plettenbach,
the Crown Prince's aide-de-camp, as I knew by the hand-writing,
for it was signed with an assumed name. In this letter the Count,
'on behalf of a mutual friend,' as he put it, requested me to
hand back to a certain Mr. Mortimer, his accredited
representative, 'Erich's present.' There were cogent reasons, it
was added, for this unusual request.

"I sent no reply to that letter, although an address in
Switzerland was given to which an answer might be despatched. I
was resolved, come what may, not to part with the Star of Poland.
When Mortimer came, five days later, I told him the jewel was not
mine to hand over, that it was part of the regalia of Poland and
that I would never give it up.

"Mortimer replied that the German and Austrian Governments had
decided to restore the independence of Poland, that probably an
Austrian Archduke would be made king a