.

"You'll have to know it, darling," said the Princess in a low voice.
"There is no reason why you should not; it no longer can touch you.
Don't you know that?"

"Y-yes----" Ruhannah's slowly drooping head was lifted again; held
high; and the wet brilliancy slowly dried in her steady eyes.

"Before I tell you," continued Neeland, "what happened to me through
Ilse Dumont, I must tell you what occurred in the train on my way to
Paris.... May I have a cigarette, Princess Naia?"

"At your elbow in that silver box."

Rue Carew lighted it for him with a smile, but her hand still
trembled.

"First," he said, "tell me what particular significance those papers
in the olive-wood box have. Then I can tell you more intelligently
what happened to me since I went to Brookhollow to find them."

"They are the German plans for the fortification of the mainland
commanding the Dardanelles, and for the forts dominating the Gallipoli
peninsula."

"Yes, I know that. But of what interest to England or France or
Russia----"

"If there is to be war, can't you understand the importance to us of
those plans?" asked the Princess in a low, quiet voice.

"To--'us'?" he repeated.

"Yes, to _us_. I am Russian, am I not?"

"Yes. I now understand how very Russian you are, Princess. But what
has Turkey----"

"What _is_ Turkey?"

"An empire----"

"No. A German province."

"I did not know----"

"That is what the Ottoman Empire is today," continued the Princess
Mistchenka, "a Turkish province fortified by Berlin, governed from
Berlin through a Germanised Turk, Enver Pasha; the army organised,
drilled, equipped, officered, and paid by the Kaiser Wilhelm; every
internal resource and revenue and development and projected
development mortgaged to Germany and under German control; and the
Sultan a nobody!"

"I did not know it," repeated Neeland.

"It is the truth, _mon ami_. It is inevitable that Turkey fights if
Germany goes to war. England, France, Russia know it. Ask yourself,
then, how enormous to us the value of those plans--tentative, sketchy,
perhaps, yet the inception and foundation of those German-made and
German-armed fortifications which today line the Dardanelles and the
adjacent waters within the sphere of Ottoman influence!"

"So _that_ is why you wanted them," he said with an unhappy glance at
Rue. "What idiotic impulse prompted me to put them back in the box I
can't imagine. You saw me do it, there in the taxicab."