"Dad wanted to tell you," she said, "but it was I who made him promise not to. I was afraid you would be disagreeable about it. We arranged it all with the Wendercombes, but as a matter of fact I did not even start with them. For the last eight months, I have been living part of the time in Berlin and part of the time in a country house near the Black Forest."
"Alone?"
"Not a bit of it! I have been governess to the two daughters of Herr Essendorf."
"Essendorf, the President of the German Republic?"
Lady Maggie nodded.
"He isn"t a bit like his pictures. He is a huge fat man and he eats a great deal too much. Oh, the horror of those meals!" she added, with a little shudder. "Think of me, dear Nigel, who never eat more than an omelette and some fruit for luncheon, compelled to sit down every day to a _mittagessen_! I wonder I have any digestion left at all."
"Do you mean that you were there under your own name?" he asked incredulously.
She shook her head.
"I secured some perfectly good testimonials before I left," she said.
"They referred to a Miss Brown, the daughter of Prebendary Brown. I was Miss Brown."
"Great Heavens!" Nigel muttered under his breath. "You heard about Atcheson?"
She nodded.
"Poor fellow, they got him all right. You talk about thrills, Nigel,"
she went on. "Do you know that the last night before I left for my vacation, I actually heard that fat old Essendorf chuckling with his wife about how his clever police had laid an English spy by the heels, and telling her, also, of the papers which they had discovered and handed over. All the time the real dispatch, written by Atcheson when he was dying, was sewn into my corsets. How"s that for an exciting situation?"
"It"s a man"s job, anyhow," Nigel declared.
She shrugged her shoulders and abandoned the personal side of the subject.
"Have you been in Germany lately, Nigel?" she enquired.
"Not for many years," he answered.
She stretched herself out upon the couch and lit a cigarette.
"The Germany of before the war of course I can"t remember," she said pensively. "I imagine, however, that there was a sort of instinctive jealous dislike towards England and everything English, simply because England had had a long start in colonisation, commerce and all the rest of it. But the feeling in Germany now, although it is marvellously hidden, is something perfectly amazing. It absolutely vibrates wherever you go. The silence makes it all the more menacing. Soon after I got to Berlin, I bought a copy of the Treaty of Peace and read it. Nigel, was it necessary to have been so bitterly cruel to a beaten enemy?"
"Logically it would seem not," Nigel admitted. "Actually, we cannot put ourselves back into the spirit of those days. You must remember that it was an unprovoked war, a war engineered by Germany for the sheer purposes of aggression. That is why a punitive spirit entered into our subsequent negotiations."
She nodded.
"I expect history will tell us some day," she continued, "that we needed a great statesman of the Beaconsfield type at the Peace table. However, that is all ended. They sowed the seed at Versailles, and I think we are going to reap the harvest."
"After all," Nigel observed thoughtfully, "it is very difficult to see what practical interference there could be with the peace of the world.
I can very well believe that the spirit is there, but when it comes to hard facts--well, what can they do? England can never be invaded. The war of 1914 proved that. Besides, Germany now has a representative on the League of Nations. She is bound to toe the line with the rest."
"It is not in Germany alone that we are disliked," Maggie reminded him.
"We seem somehow or other to have found our way into the bad books of every country in Europe. Clumsy statesmanship is it, or what?"
"I should attribute it," Nigel replied, "to the pa.s.sing of our old school of amba.s.sadors. After all, amba.s.sadors are born, not made, and they should be--they very often were--men of rare tact and perceptions.
We have no one now to inform us of the prejudices and humours of the nations. We often offend quite unwittingly, and we miss many opportunities of a _rapprochement_. It is trade, trade, trade and nothing else, the whole of the time, and the men whom we sent to the different Courts to further our commercial interests are not the type to keep us informed of the more subtle and intricate matters which sometimes need adjustment between two countries."
"That may be the explanation of all the bad feeling," Maggie admitted, "and you may be right when you say that any practical move against us is almost impossible. Dad doesn"t think so, you know. He is terribly exercised about the coming of Prince Shan."
"I must get him to talk to me," Nigel said. "As a matter of fact, I don"t think that we need fear Asiatic intervention over here. Prince Shan is too great a diplomatist to risk his country"s new prosperity."
"Prince Shan," Maggie declared, "is the one man in the world I am longing to meet. He was at Oxford with you, wasn"t he, Nigel?"
"For one year only. He went from there to Harvard."
"Tell me what he was like," she begged.
"I have only a hazy recollection of him," Nigel confessed. "He was a most brilliant scholar and a fine horseman. I can"t remember whether he did anything at games."
"Good-looking?"
"Extraordinarily so. He was very reserved, though, and even in those days he was far more exclusive than our own royal princes. We all thought him clever, but no one dreamed that he would become Asia"s great man. I"ll tell you all that I can remember about him another time, Maggie. I"m rather curious about that report of Atcheson"s. Have you any idea what it is about?"
She shook her head.
"None at all. It is in the old Foreign Office cipher and it looks like gibberish. I only know that the first few lines he transcribed gave dad the jumps."
"I wonder if he has finished it by now."
"He"ll send for you when he has. How do you think I am looking, Nigel?"
"Wonderful," he answered, rising to his feet and standing with his elbow upon the mantelpiece, gazing down at her. "But then you _are_ wonderful, aren"t you, Maggie? You know I always thought so."
She picked up a mirror from the little bag by her side and scrutinized her features.
"It can"t be my face," she decided, turning towards him with a smile. "I must have charm."
"Your face is adorable," he declared.
"Are you going to flirt with me?" she asked, with a faint smile at the corners of her lips. "You always do it so well and so convincingly. And I hate foreigners. They are terribly in earnest but there is no finesse about them. You may kiss me just once, please, Nigel, the way I like."
He held her for a moment in his arms, tenderly, but with a reserve to which she was accustomed from him. Presently she thrust him away. Her own colour had risen a little.
"Delightful," she murmured. "Think of the wasted months! No one has kissed me, Nigel, since we said good-bye."
"Have you made up your mind to marry me yet?" he asked.
"My dear," she answered, patting his hand, "do restrain your ardour. Do you really want to marry me?"
"Of course I do!"
"You don"t love me."