ure were an old tale to me. As we swung farther and
farther out, I turned to a newspaper, a twentieth extra probably, which
I had heard a newsboy crying along the dock a little earlier, and had
bribed a steward to secure. Moon and stars were lacking to-night, but
the deck lights were good reading-lamps. Moving up the rail to one of
them, I investigated the world's affairs.

From the first sheet the usual staring headlines leaped at me. There
were the inevitable peace rumor, the double denial, the eternal bulletin
of a trench taken here, a hill recaptured there. A sensational rumor was
exploited to the effect that Franz von Blenheim, one of the star secret
agents of the German Empire, was at present incognito at Washington,
having spent the past month in putting his finger in the Mexican
pie much to our disadvantage. On the last column of the page was the
photograph of a distinguished-looking young man in uniform, with an
announcement that promised some interest, I thought.

"War Scandal Bursts in France," "Scion of Oldest Noblesse Implicated,"
"Duke Mysteriously Missing," I read in the diminishing degrees of
the scare-head type. Then came the picture, with a mien attractively
debonair, a pleasantly smiling mouth, and a sympathetic pair of eyes,
and in due course, the tale. I clutched at the flapping ends of the
paper and read on:

Of all the scandals to which the present war has given birth, none
has stirred France more profoundly than that implicating
Jean-Herve-Marie-Olivier, Count of Druyes, Marquis of Beuil and
Santenay, and Duke of Raincy-la-Tour. This young nobleman, head of a
family that has played its part in French history since the days of the
Northmen and the crusaders, bears in his veins the bluest blood of the
old regime, and numbers among his ancestors no fewer than seven marshals
and five constables of France.

A noted figure not only by his birth, his wealth, and his various
historic chateaux, but also by his sporting proclivities, his daring
automobile racing, his marvelous fencing, and his spectacular hunting
trips, the Duke of Raincy-la-Tour has long been in addition an amateur
aviator of considerable fame, and it was to the French Flying Corps that
he was attached when hostilities began. Here he distinguished himself
from the first by his coolness, his extraordinary resource, and his
utter contempt for danger, and became one of the idols of the French
army and a proverb for success and audacity