at a dinner table."

"Yes."

"It's amusing, isn't it? A careless and innocent word to that old
busybody, Ahmed Mirka Pasha, at my table--that began it. Then another
word to Izzet Bey. And I had scarcely time to realise what had
happened--barely time to telegraph James in New York--before their
entire underground machinery was set in motion to seize those wretched
papers in Brookhollow!"

Neeland said:

"You don't know even yet, Princess, how amazingly fast that machinery
worked."

"Tell me now, James. I have time enough to write my warning since it
is already too late." And she seated herself on the sofa and drew
Ruhannah down beside her.

"Listen, dear," she said with pretty mockery, "here is a most worthy
young man who is simply dying to let us know how picturesque a man can
be when he tries to."

Neeland laughed:

"The only trouble with me," he retorted, "is that I've a rather
hopeless habit of telling the truth. Otherwise there'd be some chance
for me as a hero in what I'm going to tell you."

And he began with his first encounter with Ilse Dumont in Rue Carew's
house at Brookhollow. After he had been speaking for less than a
minute, Rue Carew's hands tightened in the clasp of the Princess Naia,
who glanced at the girl and noticed that she had lost her colour.

And Neeland continued his partly playful, partly serious narrative of
"moving accidents by flood and field," aware of the girl's deep,
breathless interest, moved by it, and, conscious of it, the more
inclined to avoid the picturesque and heroic, and almost ashamed to
talk of himself at all under the serious beauty of the girl's clear
eyes.

But he could scarcely tell his tale and avoid mentioning himself; he
was the centre of it all, the focus of the darts of Fate, and there
was no getting away from what happened to himself.

So he made the melodrama a comedy, and the moments of deadly peril he
treated lightly. And one thing he avoided altogether, and that was
how he had kissed Ilse Dumont.

When he finished his account of his dreadful situation in the
stateroom of Ilse Dumont, and how at the last second her unerring
shots had shattered the bomb clock, cut the guy-rope, and smashed the
water-jug which deluged the burning fuses, he added with a very
genuine laugh:

"If only some photographer had taken a few hundred feet of film for me
I could retire on an income in a year and never do another stroke of
honest work!"

The Princess smiled,