ered the room with flamboyant ease.

"It is well to be young!" he exclaimed, as he bent over Naida's fingers.
"You look, my far-away but much beloved cousin, as though you had slept
peacefully through the night and spent the morning in this soft, sunlit
air, with perhaps, if one might suggest such a thing, an hour at a Bond
Street beauty parlour. Here am I with crow's-feet under my eyes and
ghosts walking by my side. Yet none the less," he added, as the door
opened and Maggie appeared, "looking forward to my luncheon and to hear
all the news."

"There is no news," Naida declared, as the butler announced the service
of the meal. "We have reached the far end of the ways. The next
disclosures, if ever they are made, will come from others. At luncheon
we are going to talk of the English country, the seaside, the meadows,
and the quiet places. The time arrives when I weary, weary, of the
brazen ticking of the clock of fate."

"I shall tell you," Nigel declared, "of a small country house I have in
Devonshire. There are rough grounds stretching down to the sea and
crawling up to the moors behind. My grandfather built it when he was
Chancellor of England, or rather he added to an old farmhouse. He called
it the House of Peace."

"My father built a house very much in the same spirit," Naida told them.
"He called it after an old Turkish inscription, engraven on the front of
a villa in Stamboul--'The House of Thought and Flowers.'"

Maggie smiled across the table approvingly.

"I like the conversation," she said. "Naida and I are, after all, women
and sentimentalists. We claim a respite, an armistice--call it what you
will. Prince Karschoff, won't you tell me of the most beautiful house
you ever dwelt in?"

"Always the house I am hoping to end my days in," he answered. "But let
me tell you about a villa I had in Cannes, fifteen years ago. People
used to speak of it as one of the world's treasures."

When the two men were seated alone over their coffee, Nigel passed
Chalmers' note and the enclosure across to his companion.

"You remember I told you about Chalmers' friend, Jesson, the secret
service man who came over to us?" he said. "Chalmers has just sent me
round this."

Karschoff nodded and studied the message through his great horn-rimmed
eyeglass.

"I thought that he was going to Russia for you," he said.

"So he did. He must have gone on from there."

"And the message comes from Southern China," Prince Karscho