im often with feelings of pity. Though a criminal of a
criminal stock, ill-bred, and with scarcely any education, yet he had
behaved to her as few men had behaved. He had always held her in high
esteem and respect. Even as she stood there she could hear his
high-pitched voice addressing her as "Madame."

Upstairs, by the bedside of the sick Cabinet Minister, the thin,
grey-faced man, "the eyes and ears of the Cabinet," was making a secret
report to his lordship.

Though the Earl of Bracondale, K.G., was His Majesty's Principal
Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, yet Darnborough, the
ever-astute, sleepless man of secrets, was the keeper of Great Britain's
prestige abroad. Though his name never appeared on the roll of
Government servants, and did not draw any salary as an official, yet he
was the only man in England who could demand audience of the Sovereign
at any hour by day or by night, or who had the free _entree_ to the
Royal residences and could attend any function uninvited.

As a statesman, as a secret agent, as an ingenious plotter in the
interests of his country, he was a genius. He was a discovery of the
late Lord Salisbury in the last days of the Victorian Era. At that time
he had been a Foreign Office clerk, a keen-eyed young man with a lock of
black hair hanging loosely across his brow. Lord Salisbury recognised in
him a man of genius as a diplomat, and with his usual bluntness called
him one day to Hatfield and gave him a very delicate mission abroad.

Darnborough went. He had audience with the Shah of Persia, juggled with
that bediamonded potentate, and came back with his draft of a secret
treaty directed against Russia's influence safely in his pocket. He had
achieved what British Ministers to Teheran for the previous fifteen
years had failed to effect. And from that moment Darnborough had been
allowed a free hand in international politics.

Lord Rosebery, Lord Lansdowne, and Sir Edward Grey had adopted the same
attitude towards him as the great Lord Salisbury. He was the one man who
knew the secret policy of Britain's enemies, the man who had so often
attended meetings of the Cabinet and warned it of the pitfalls open for
the destruction of British prestige.

At that moment the renowned chief of the Secret Service was explaining
the latest conspiracy afoot against England, a serious conspiracy
hatched in both Berlin and Vienna to embroil our nation in complications
in the Far East. Darnborough'