THE WORLD MASTERS

Ready shortly

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

SIDELIGHTS ON CONVICT LIFE

With numerous Illustrations
taken from Life

Crown 8vo, Cloth Gilt, 6s.

JOHN LONG, Publisher
LONDON

THE WORLD MASTERS

BY

GEORGE GRIFFITH

AUTHOR OF
"The Angel of the Revolution," "Brothers of the Chain,"
"The Justice of Revenge," "A Honeymoon in Space,"
"Captain Johnnie," etc. etc.

London
John Long
13 and 14 Norris Street, Haymarket
1903
[All Rights Reserved]

THE WORLD MASTERS

PROLOGUE

THE MOMENT OF TRIUMPH

High above the night-shrouded street, whose silence was only broken by the occasional tramp of the military patrol or the gruff challenges of the sentries on the fortifications, a man was walking, with jerky, uneven strides, up and down a vast attic in an ancient house overlooking the old Fisher's Gate, close by where the River Ill leaves the famous city of Strassburg.

The room, practically destitute of ordinary furniture, was fitted up as a chemical and physical laboratory, and the man was Doctor Emil Fargeau, the most distinguished scientific investigator that the lost province of Alsace had produced—a tall, spare man of about sixty, with sloping, stooping shoulders and forward-thrown head, thinly covered with straggling iron-grey hair. It was plain that he was in the habit of shaving clean, but just now there was a short white stubble both on his upper lip and on the lean wrinkled cheeks which showed the nervous workings of the muscles so plainly. In fact, his whole appearance was that of a man too completely absorbed by an over-mastering idea to pay any attention to the small details of life.

And such was the exact truth—for these few mid-night minutes which were being ticked off by an ancient wooden clock in the corner were the most anxious of his life. In fact, a few more of them would decide whether the Great Experiment, for which he had sacrificed everything, even to his home and his great professional position, was to be a success or a failure.

On the long, bare, pine table, beside which he was pacing up and down, stood a strange fabric about three feet high. It was round, and about the size of a four-gallon ale jar. It was covered completely by a closed glass cylinder, and rested on four strong glass supports. From the floor on either side of the table a number of twisted, silk-covered wires rose from two sets of storage batteries. Within the four supports was a wooden dish, and on this lay a piece of bright steel some four inches square and about an inch thick, just under a circle of needles which hung down in a circle from the bottom of the machine.

A very faint humming sound filled the room, and made a somewhat uncanny accompaniment to the leisurely tick of the clock and the irregular shuffling of the doctor's slippered feet.

Every now and then he stopped, and put his ear near to the machine, and then looked at the piece of steel with a gleam of longing anticipation in his keen, deep-set, grey eyes. Then he began his walk again, and his lips went on working, as though he were holding an inaudible conversation with himself. At last there came a faint whirr from the clock, a little window opened, and a wooden bird bobbed out and said "Cuckoo" once. The doctor stopped instantly, took out his watch and compared it with the clock.

"Now, let us see!" he said, quietly, in his somewhat guttural Alsatian French, for in this supreme moment of his life he had gone back to the patois of his boyhood, which he had spoken in the days before the Teuton's iron hand had snatched his well-loved native land from France and begun to rule it according to the pitiless doctrine of Blood and Iron.

He pulled the platter out from under the machine, picked up a little wooden mallet from the table, and, with a trembling hand, struck the steel plate in the centre. It splintered instantly to fragments, as though it had only been a thin sheet of glass. The doctor dropped the mallet, lifted his hand to the window that looked out over the river towards the citadel, and said:

"It is done! And so, Germany, stealer of our land and oppressor of my people, will I break the great fabric of your power with one touch of this weak old hand of mine!"

Then he threw open one of the old-fashioned dormer windows that looked out over the northern part of the city towards France, and began to speak again in a low, intense tone which rose and fell slightly as his deep breaths came and went.

"But France, my beautiful mother France, thou shalt know soon that I have done more than given thee the power to turn on thy conqueror and crush him. I can make thee queen and mistress of the world, and I will do it. The other nations shall live and prosper only at thy bidding, and they shall pay thee tribute for the privilege of being something more than the savages from which they came.

"Those who will not pay thee tribute shall go back to the Stone Age, for I will show thee how to make their metals useless. Only with thy permission shall their steam-engines work for them, or their telegraphs record their words; for I have found the Soul of the World, the Living Principle of Material Things, and I will draw it out of the fabric of Nature as I have done out of that block of steel. And I will give it into thy hands, and the nations shall live or die according to thy pleasure.

"And you, Adelaide, daughter of our ancient line of kings, descendant of the Grand Monarch, you shall join hands with my Victor after he has flung off the livery of his servitude, and together you shall raise up the throne of Saint Louis in the place where these usurpers and Republican canaille have reigned over ruined France. The Prince of Condé shall sit in the seat of his ancestors, and after him Adelaide de Montpensier—and Victor, my son, shall stand beside her, ruler of the world!

"A miracle, and yet 'tis true! Possible, for I have made it possible. It is only for France to believe me and spend her millions—millions that will buy her the Empire of the Earth, and it is done—done as easily as I worked that seeming miracle just now. I have risked much—all—for I have hazarded even honour itself; but my faith is justified, and I have won—and now, let me see how I stand before the world for the present."

He went and sat down before the only piece of ordinary furniture that the laboratory contained, an old oak bureau, on which stood a little shaded reading-lamp. He unlocked a drawer, and took out a little wash-leather bag. He undid it and emptied it into his hand. There were ten twenty-mark pieces—just ten pounds and a few pence in English money. In his pocket he had perhaps twenty-five marks more.

"It is not much," he whispered, as he looked at the gold in his hand; "not much at the end of a life's work, as the world would call it. But the world knows nothing of that!" he went on, half-turning his head towards the machine on the table. "As the world takes wealth, this is all that is left of fortune, lands, and savings. Everything is gone but this, and that—ay, and more also. Yes, it was a hard fate that forced me to do that. Still, science showed me how to alter the figures so that not even the filthy Jew Weinthal himself could tell if he had the draft in his hand. That he will never have; for it has a month to run, and before that France will have made me rich. It was not right, but the scoundrel only gave me half what the last farm was worth, and I had to have more to finish my work. Yet, is it not honourable even to sin in such a cause! Well, well, it is over now. I have triumphed, and that atones for all; and so to bed and good dreams, and to-morrow to Paris!"

CHAPTER I

It was the 27th of January, the Kaiser's birthday, and the reception-rooms of the German Embassy, on the Nevski Prospekt, overlooking the snow-covered quays and ice-bound waters of the Neva, were filled with as brilliant a throng as could have been found between the Ourals and the English Channel.

It has been said that Petersburg in the winter season contains more beautiful women than any other capital in Europe; and certainly the fair guests of His Excellency the German Ambassador to the Court of the White Czar went far towards proving the truth of the saying. The dresses were as ideal as they were indescribable, and the jewels which blazed round the softly moulded throats and on the fair white breasts, and gleamed on dainty coiffures of every hue, from ebony black to the purest flaxen, would have been bad to match even among the treasures of Oriental princes.

The men, too, were splendid in every variety of uniform, from the gold-laced broadcloth of Diplomacy to the white and gold of the Imperial Guard. Not a man was present whose left breast was not glittering with stars and medals, and, in most cases, crossed with the ribbon of some distinguished Order.

The windless, frosty air outside was still vocal with the jingling of the sleigh-bells as the vehicles sped swiftly and noiselessly up to the open doors, for it was only a little after ten, and all the guests had not yet arrived. Precisely at half-past a sleigh drawn by three perfectly black Orloff horses swept into the courtyard, and a few minutes later the major-domo passed through the open folding-doors and said, in loud but well-trained tones:

"His Highness the Prince de Condé, Duc de Montpensier! Mademoiselle la Marquise de Montpensier!"

At the same moment two lacqueys held aside the heavy curtains which hung on the inside of the doorway, and the latest arrivals entered.

The announcement of the once most noble names in Europe instantly hushed the hum of conversation, and all eyes were turned towards the doorway.

They saw a tall, straight, well-set-up man of about fifty, with dark moustache and imperial, and iron-grey hair still thick and strong. A single glance at his features showed that they bore the indelible stamp of the old Bourbon race. The high, somewhat narrow, forehead was continued in a straight line to the end of the long thin nose. The somewhat high cheek-bones, the delicate ears, the thin, sensitive nostrils, and the strong, slightly protruding chin, might have belonged to the Grande Monarque himself.

He was in ordinary court dress, the broad red ribbon of the Order of St Vladimir crossed his breast, the collar and jewel of the Golden Fleece hung from his neck, and the stars of half-a-dozen other Orders glittered on the left breast of his coat; but, though he bore the greatest name in France, there was not a French order among them, for Louis Xavier de Condé was a voluntary exile from the land over which his ancestors had once ruled so splendidly and so ruinously.

For three generations his branch of the great family had refused to recognise any ruler in France, from the First Consul to the President of the Third Republic. In his eyes they were one and all usurpers and plebeian upstarts, who ruled only by the suffrages of an ignorant and deluded mob. In short, his creed and the rule of his daily life were hatred and contempt of the French democracy. On this subject he was almost a fanatic, and in days soon to come this fanaticism of his was destined to influence events, of which only three people in all that crowded assembly were even dreaming.

The girl at his side—for she was not yet twenty-one—might well have been taken for a twentieth-century replica of Marie Antoinette, and to say that, is to say that among all the beautiful and stately women in that brilliant concourse, none were quite so beautiful and stately as Adelaide de Condé, Marquise de Montpensier.

Of all the hundred eyes which were turned upon this peerless daughter of the line of St Louis, the most eager were those of a splendidly-built young fellow of about twenty-eight, dressed in the blue and white uniform of the Uhlan regiment of the German army. Captain Victor Fargeau, military attaché to the German Embassy in Petersburg, was perhaps the handsomest, and, at the same time, manliest-looking man in all that company of soldiers and diplomats. At least, so certainly thought Adelaide de Condé, as she saw his dark blue eyes light up with a swift gleam of admiration, and the bronze on his cheeks grow deeper as the quick blood flushed beneath it.

It was a strange bond that united the daughter of the Bourbons with the soldier and subject of the German Kaiser, and yet it must have been a close one. For, after the first formal presentations were over, her eyes sent a quick signal to his, which brought him instantly to her side, and when their hands met the clasp was closer, and lasted just a moment longer than mere acquaintance or even friendship would have warranted.

"Can you tell me, Captain, whether the gentleman who calls himself the French Ambassador has honoured us with his presence to-night?" said the Prince, as he shook hands with the young soldier.

"No, Prince, he has not," he replied. "I hear that, almost at the last moment, he sent an attaché with his regrets and excuses. Of course, as you know, there is a little friction between the Governments just now, and naturally, too, he would know that Your Highness and Mam'selle la Marquise would honour us with your presence—so, on the whole, I suppose he thought it more convenient to discover some important diplomatic matter which would deprive him of the pleasure of joining us."

"Ah," said the Marquise, looking up at him with a glance and a smile that set his pulses jumping, "then perhaps Sophie Valdemar was right when she told me this afternoon that His Excellency had really a good excuse for not coming—an interview with Count Lansdorf, and afterwards with no less a personage than the Little Father himself! And, you know, Sophie knows everything."

"Ah yes," said the Prince; "I had forgotten that. You told me of it. I should not wonder if the subject of their conversation were not unconnected with an increase of the French fleet in Chinese waters. And then Morocco is——"

"Chut, papa!" said the Marquise, in a low tone, "we must not talk politics here. In Petersburg ceilings have eyes and walls have ears."

"That is true," laughed Victor; "not even Embassies here are neutral ground."

At this moment a lacquey approached and bowed to Captain Fargeau.

"Pardon me a moment," he said to his companions; "I am wanted for something, and I can see a good many envious eyes looking this way. Ah, there goes the music! They will be dancing presently, and there will be many candidates for Mam'selle's hand. But you will keep me a waltz or two, won't you? and may I hope also for supper?"

"My dear Victor," she replied, with a bewildering smile, "have I not already told you that you may hope for everything? Meanwhile, au revoir! When you have done your business you will find us in the salon."

As he moved away, the curtains were again drawn aside, and the major-domo announced:

"His Excellency Count Valdemar! The Countess Sophie Valdemar!"

The Count was a big, strongly-built man in diplomatic uniform. His face was of the higher Russian type, and heavily bearded. His daughter, the Countess Sophie, was a strange contrast to him, slight and fair, with perfectly cut features, almost Grecian in their regularity, golden-bronze hair, dark, straight eyebrows, and big, wide-set, pansy-blue eyes. The only Russian trait that she possessed was her mouth—full-lipped and sensuous, almost sensular, in fact; and yet it was small enough, and the lips were so daintily shaped that it added to, rather than detracted from her beauty.

They were lips whose kisses had lured more than one bearer of a well-known name to destruction. Some they had sent to the scaffold, and others were still dreaming of their fatal sweetness in prison or in hopeless exile; for Sophie Valdemar, daughter of Count Leo Valdemar, Chief of the Third Section of the Ministry of the Interior, had been trained up from girlhood by her father in every art of intrigue, until even he was fully justified in calling her the most skilful diplomatic detective in Europe.

To her friends and acquaintances she was just a charming and brilliantly-accomplished girl of nineteen, who had reigned as undisputed Queen of Beauty in Moscow and Petersburg until Adelaide de Condé had come from Vienna with her father, and, by some mysterious means, unknown even to her, had been received into instant favour at Court, and in the most exclusive circles in the most exclusive city in the world. In fact, the enigma which it was the present object of her life to solve was how this could be possible—granted the tacit alliance between the Russian Empire and the French Republic, and the Prince's openly expressed contempt for all modern things French and Republican. There were, indeed, only three people in Europe who could have solved that riddle, and she was not one of them.

As she entered she saw Victor coming towards her. Instantly her eyes brightened, and the faintest of flushes showed through the pallor of her silken skin. He stopped for a moment to greet them, but his clasp on her hand was nothing more than the formal pressure which friendship expects, and she looked in vain for any gleam in his eyes answering that in her own.

When he had passed in towards the door she flung a swift glance round the room, and as the soft pansy eyes rested on the exquisite shape and lovely face of Adelaide de Condé they seemed to harden and blacken for just the fraction of a second. The next moment she and her father were greeting the Prince and the Marquise with a cordiality that was only tempered by the almost indefinable reserve which the place and the situation made indispensable.

"My dear Marquise," she said, in that soft, pure French which, outside France, is only heard in Russia, "if possible, you have excelled yourself to-night; you are a perfect vision——"

"My dear Sophie," laughed the Marquise, "what is the matter? You seem as formal as you wish to be flattering; but really, if it is a matter of compliments, it is not you, but I who should be paying them."

"Quite a waste of time, my dear children," laughed the Count, gruffly. "Imagine you two paying each other compliments when there are a couple of hundred men here with thousands of them crowding up to their lips. Still, Prince," he went on, "it is better so than rivalry, for rival beauty has always worked more harm in the world than rival ambitions."

"There can be no question of rivalry, my dear Count," replied the Prince. "Why should the Evening envy the Morning, or the Lily be jealous of the Rose?"

"Put like a Frenchman and a statesman, Prince: that was said as only one of the old regime could say it," said Sophie, with a little backward movement of her head. "How is it that the men of this generation never say things like that—or, if they try to, bungle over it."

"Perhaps they are too busy to revive the lost art of politeness," laughed Adelaide. "But come, papa; they are playing a lovely waltz, and I am dying for a dance, and so is Sophie, I daresay."

"And, by their looks, many of these young men are dying of the same complaint; so suppose we go into the salon," said the Prince, offering his arm to Sophie.

It was nearly half-an-hour before Victor found Adelaide disengaged in the ball-room. The first waltz that she had saved for him was just beginning, and, as he slipped his arm round her waist, he whispered under cover of the music:

"If you please, we will just take a couple of turns, and then you will give me a few precious minutes of your company in the winter garden."

She glanced up swiftly at him with a look of keen inquiry, and whispered in reply:

"Of course, my Victor, if you wish it; especially as it is getting a little warm here—and no doubt you have something more interesting for me than dancing."

"I think you will find it so," he said, as they glided away into the shining, smoothly-swirling throng which filled the great salon.

After two or three turns they stopped at the curtained entrance of the vast conservatory, whose tropical trees and flowers and warm scented air formed a delicious contrast to the cold, black, Russian winter's night. Almost at the same moment Sophie Valdemar said to her partner, a smart young officer of the Imperial Guard:

"I think that will do for the present, if you don't mind; I don't feel very vigorous to-night, somehow: suppose you find me a seat in the garden, and then go and tell one of the men to bring me an ice."

They stopped just as Victor and Adelaide passed through the curtains. They followed a couple of yards behind them, and Sophie quickened her step a little, her teeth came together with a little snap, and her eyes darkened again as she saw Adelaide look up at her companion and heard her say softly:

"Well, what is your news—for I am sure you have some?"

"Yes, I have," he replied; "and the greatest of good news; you know from whom?"

"Ah," said Adelaide, with a little catch in her voice, "from him; and has he——"

"Succeeded? Yes; and to the fullest of his expectations. He goes to Paris to-morrow, and then——"

The rest of the sentence was lost to Sophie as they turned away into the garden.

Her companion found her a seat under a tree-fern, and left her leaning back in her long-cushioned chair of Russian wicker, looking across the winter garden, through the palms and ferns, at Victor and Adelaide, as they moved along, obviously looking for a secluded corner. During those few moments her whole nature had, for the time being, completely changed. The jealous, passionate woman had vanished, and in her place remained the cold, clear-headed, highly-trained intriguer, with incarnate and unemotional intellect, thinking swiftly and logically, trying to find some meaning in the words that she had just heard, words which, if she had only known their import, she would have found pregnant with the fate of Europe.

"I wonder who has succeeded beyond his best expectations? Someone closely connected with both of them, of course! And Paris—why should his success take him to Paris? Victor Fargeau, Alsatian though he is, is one of the most brilliant of the younger generation of German officers, a favourite of the Emperor, a member of the Staff, and attaché here in Petersburg. And she, my dear friend and enemy, is a Bourbon, an aristocrat of the first water, the daughter of an open enemy of our very good and convenient ally the French Republic. Paris—he who has succeeded is going to Paris. Well, I would give a good deal to know who he is and why he is going to Paris."

CHAPTER II

"And so, Monsieur le Ministre, I am to take that as your final word? I have given you every proof that I can—saving the impossible—the bringing of my apparatus from Strassburg to Paris, which, of course, you know is an impossibility, since it would have to cross the frontier, which was once a French high road. I have shown you the facts, the figures, the drawings—everything. Can you not see that I am honest, that I love my country, from which I have been torn away—I who come from a family that has lived in Alsace since it was first French territory—I who am a Frenchman through five generations—I who have sold my son to the Prussians—I who have masqueraded for years in the Prussian University of Strassburg, once the Queen of the Rhine Province—I who have discovered a secret which has lain buried since the days of the great Faraday—I who have discovered, or I should say re-discovered, after him the true theory, and, what is more, the actual working of the magnetic tides which flow north and south through the two hemispheres to the pole—I who can give you, Monsieur le Ministre, and through you France, the control of those tides, so that you may make them ebb and flow as the tides of the sea do—prosperity with the flow, adversity with the ebb, that is what it comes to—ah, it is incredible!

"Once more, not as a scientist, not as an inventor, but only as a loyal son of France, let me implore you, Monsieur le Ministre, not to regard what I have told you as the dream of an enthusiast who has only dreamt and not done."

"If you have done as much as you say, Monsieur," replied the French Minister of War, leaning back in his chair and twisting up the left point of his moustache as he looked coldly and incredulously across his desk at Doctor Emil Fargeau, late Professor of Physical Science at the University of Strassburg, "how comes it that you have not been able to bring actual, tangible proofs to me here in Paris? Why, for instance, could you not have performed the miracle that you have just been telling me about in one of our laboratories in Paris? If you had done that—well, we might have investigated the miracle, and, after investigation, might have some conviction—a conviction, if you will pardon me saying so, which might have enabled us to overcome the very natural prejudice that the Government of the Republic may be expected to have against a man of ancient family, whose ancestors had been French subjects for, as you say, five generations, but who has become himself a German subject, and has permitted his son, his only son, to enter the Prussian service, and has endured the shame of seeing him rise year after year, rank upon rank, in the favour of the man who is destined to be to Germany what the Great Napoleon was to France.

"No, sir, I cannot believe you; I can understand what you have told me about what you call your invention, but understanding without conviction is like hunger without a good dinner. I am not satisfied. Bring your apparatus here; let me see it work. Convince me that you can do what you say, and all that you ask for is yours; but without conviction I can guarantee you nothing.

"With every consideration that is due to the position that you have occupied in what may be called the enemy's country, the stolen provinces, I must take leave to say that very few days pass without an interview of this kind. I assure you, my dear sir, that saviours of our country and regainers of the Lost Provinces are to be counted by hundreds, but we have not yet found one whose scheme is capable of sustaining a practical test."

"But, Monsieur le Ministre, I can assure you with equal faith that this is not a scheme, a theory, a something in the air. On the contrary, it is a theory reduced to fact—solid fact; what I have said to you I can do before you. I can convince you——"

"Exactly, my dear sir, exactly," said the Minister; "you will not think me discourteous if I say that within the last six months I have had visits from inventors of air-ships who could create aerial navies which would assume the dominion of the air, annihilate armies and fleets, and make fortifications useless because impotent. Others have come to me with plans which, if the theory could only have been translated into practice, would have given us a submarine navy which in six months would have sunk every cruiser and battleship on the ocean. In fact, in one of the drawers of this very bureau I have a most exactly detailed scheme for diverting the Gulf Stream through the much-lamented Panama Canal into the Pacific, and so reducing the British Islands, the home of our ancient enemies, to the conditions—I mean, of course, the climatic conditions, of Labrador. That is to say, that nine months in the year London, Southampton, Plymouth, Liverpool, Glasgow, to say nothing of the ports on the east and the south, would be frozen up. The British Navy—that curse of the world—could not operate; Britain's shipping trade would be paralysed, and after that her industries. They are free-traders, and so they don't believe it; but it would be if it could be done. But it could not be done, Monsieur; and that is the objection which I have to this most splendidly promising scheme of yours."

"But, Monsieur le Ministre, I assure that it is only a question of—well, I will say a few thousand francs to convince you that I am not one of those scientific adventurers who have perhaps imposed on the credulity of the Government before. What I have described to you is the truth—the truth as I have wrought it by my own labour, as I have seen it with my own eyes, as I have finished it with my own hand."

"Tres bien, Monsieur! Then all you have to do is, as I said before, to bring your apparatus here, perform the same experiment before a committee of experts, and if you break the piece of steel as you would a piece of glass—voila, c'est fini! We are convinced, and what you ask for will be granted."

"But, Monsieur le Ministre, nothing could be fairer than that; only you have not remembered what I told you during our last interview. I have spent hundreds of thousands of francs to bring this idea of mine to perfection. I have spent every centime——"

"Pfennige I think you should call them, Professor," interrupted the Minister, with a perceptible sneer. "I am afraid you are forgetting your new nationality; and, since you are a German subject, living in German territory, as it now is, it is permissible for me to ask why this wonderful invention of yours was not offered first to Germany—that is to say, if it has not already been offered and refused."

As the Minister of War spoke these few momentous words, accentuating them with his pen on the blotting-pad in front of him, Doctor Fargeau arose from his seat on the other side of the desk, and said, in a voice which would have been stronger had it not been broken by an uncontrollable emotion:

"Monsieur le Ministre, you have spoken, and, officially, the matter is finished. Through you I have offered France the Empire of the World. Through you France has refused it. You ask me to bring my apparatus here to Paris, to prove that it is a question of practice, not of theory. I cannot do it, and why?—because, as I told you, I have spent every centime, or pfennige, if you like, in making this thing possible.

"Everything is gone: the farms and vineyards that have been ours since the days of St Louis are mortgaged. We are homeless. I have no home to go back to. I have borrowed more than I can pay; I trusted everything to you, to the intelligence and patriotism of France. I have not even enough money to take me back to the home that I have ruined for the sake of France and her lost provinces. It was impossible to think that you would disbelieve me. A thousand francs, Monsieur le Ministre, would be enough—enough to save me from ruin, and to make France the mistress of the world. Even out of your own pocket, it would not be very much. Think, I implore you, of all that I have suffered and sacrificed; of all the hours that I have spent in making this great ideal a reality——"

"And which, if you will excuse me saying so, monsieur," replied the Minister, rising rather sharply from his seat, "has yet to be proved to our satisfaction, to be a concrete reality instead of a dream—the dream of an enthusiast who does not even possess the credit of having remained a Frenchman. If, indeed, your personal necessities are so pressing, and a fifty-franc note would be of any use to you—well, seeing that you were once a Frenchman——"

As he said this the Minister took his pocket-book out, and, as he did so, Doctor Fargeau sprang from his seat, and said, in quick, husky tones:

"Mais, non, Monsieur le Ministre! I came here not to ask for charity, but to give France the dominion of the world. Those whom she has chosen as her advisers have treated me either as a lunatic or a quack. Very well, let it be so. Through you I have offered to France a priceless gift; you have refused it for the sake of a paltry thousand francs or so. Very well, you will see the end of this, though I shall not. I have devoted my life to this ideal. I have dreamt the dream of France the Mistress of the World, as she was in the days of la Grande Monarque. I have found the means of realising the ideal. You and those who with you rule the destinies of France have refused to accept my statements as true. On your heads be it, as the Moslems say. I have done. If this dream of mine should ever be heard of again, if it should ever be realised, France may some day learn how much she has lost through her official incredulity."

Emil Fargeau left the Minister of War a broken man—broken in mind and heart as well as in means. In youth it is easy, in early manhood it is possible, to survive the sudden destruction of a life's ideal; but when the threescore years have been counted, and the dream and the labours of half a lifetime are suddenly brought to nought, it is another matter. It is ruin—utter and hopeless; and so it was with Emil Fargeau.

He had risked everything on what he had honestly believed to be the certainty of his marvellous discovery being taken up and developed by the French Government. In fact, he was so certain of it, that, before leaving his laboratory at Strassburg, he had taken the precaution to destroy the essential parts of his accumulator, lest, during his absence, his sanctum might be invaded and some one stumble by accident on his discovery. In a word, he had staked everything and lost everything. To go back was impossible. Everything he had was sold or mortgaged. He had been kept by official delays more than a fortnight in Paris, and he had barely a hundred francs left, and even of this more than half would be necessary to pay his modest hotel bill for the week.

And then, worse than all, there was that fatal indiscretion into which he had permitted his enthusiasm to betray him—an indiscretion which placed him absolutely at the mercy of a German Jew money-lender, who, under the rigid laws of Germany, could send him to penal servitude for the rest of his life.

No, there was no help for it; there was only one way out of the terrible impasse into which his enthusiasm, and that moral weakness which is so often associated with great intellectual power, had led him, and that way he took.

He went back to his hotel, and spent about an hour in writing letters. One of these was directed to Captain Victor Fargeau, German Embassy, Petersburg. Another was directed to Reuss Weinthal, Judenstrasse, Strassburg. The third, without date or signature, he placed in a little air-tight tin case, with the complete specifications of his discovery.

He took off his coat and waistcoat, and fastened this to his body so that it just came in the small of his back. Then, when he had dressed himself and put on a light overcoat, he took a small handbag, for appearance's sake, walked to the Nord Station, and took a second-class ticket to Southampton, via le Havre.

At midnight the steamer was in mid-channel, and Emil Fargeau was taking his last look on sea and sky from the fore-deck. For a moment he looked back eastward over the dark waters towards the land of his ruined hopes, and murmured brokenly:

"My beautiful France, I have offered you the Empire of the World, but the dolts and idiots you have chosen to govern you have refused it. 'Tant pis pour toi'! Now I will give the secret to the Fates—to reveal it or to keep it hidden for ever, as they please. For me it is the end!"

As the last words left his lips he took a rapid glance round the deserted deck, and slipped over the rail into the creaming water that was swirling past the vessel's side. In another moment one of the whirling screws had caught him and smashed him out of human shape, and what was left of him, with the little tin box containing the secrets of a world-empire lashed to it, went floating away in the broad wake that the steamer left behind it.

CHAPTER III

It was a lovely May morning on the English Channel, and the steam yacht Nadine was travelling under easy steam at about eight knots an hour midway between Guernsey and Southampton. Her owner, Ernest Shafto Hardress, Viscount Branston, eldest son of the Earl of Orrel, was taking his early coffee on the bridge with his college chum and guest, Frank Lamson, M.A. of Cambridge, and Doctor of Science of London, the youngest man save one who had won the gold medal in the examination for that distinguished degree. In fact, he was only thirty-two, and the medal had already been in his possession nearly a year.

The morning was so exquisitely mild, that sea and sky looked rather as though they were in the Mediterranean instead of the Channel. They were sitting in their pyjamas, with their bare feet in grass slippers.

"Well, I suppose it's time to go below and shave and dress; Miss Chrysie and Lady Olive will be up soon, and we'll have to make ourselves presentable," said Lamson, getting out of his deck-chair and throwing the end of his cigarette overboard. "Hello, what's that? Here, Hardress, get up! There's a body there in the water, horribly mangled."

"What!" exclaimed Hardress, springing from his seat and going to the end of the bridge where Lamson was standing. "So it is! Poor chap, what can have made such a mess of him as that?"

"Fallen overboard from a steamer, I should say, and got mopped by the screw," said Lamson, in his cold, bloodless voice. "It's a way screws have, you know, especially twin screws."

"That's just like you, Lamson," said Hardress; "you talk about the poor chap just as if he was an empty barrel. Still, he's been a man once, and it's only fair that he should have Christian burial, anyhow."

As he said this he caught the handle of the engine telegraph and pulled it over. "Stop." The yacht slowed down immediately, and he went on:

"Lamson, you might go and send the stewardess to tell the ladies not to get up for half-an-hour or so. This isn't exactly the sort of job a woman wants to see. Mr Jackson, will you kindly lower away the quarter-boat?"

The young Viscount was right—for the object that was hauled in from the sea could hardly even be called a human corpse, so frightfully was it mangled out of all mortal shape. When it was brought on board, a careful search was made through the tattered remnants of clothing that were still attached to it for some marks of identification; but nothing was found. A couple of pockets, one in the waistcoat and one in the trousers which were left intact, contained nothing. There was no mark on what was left of the linen. The upper half of the head was gone, and so there was no use in photographing the remains. In short, the ghastly spectacle was the only revelation of a secret of the sea which might never be further revealed.

"I'm afraid it's no good," said Lamson; "there's nothing that anybody could recognise the poor chap by. In fact, it looks to me like a case of deliberate suicide by someone who didn't want to be identified. He's evidently fallen overboard from a steamer, and people don't do that by accident with empty pockets. For instance, that inside coat pocket was made to button, and would probably have had a pocket-book and tickets in it. From what's left of them I should say the clothes were French, and, judging by the locality, I should say he might have been a French passenger from le Havre—perhaps to Southampton on one of the South-Western boats. Hello, what's this? Perhaps this is a clue to the mystery."

As he spoke he put his hand on the back of the body, where the sodden clothes outlined an oblong shape, a few moments after it had been turned over.

"It feels like a box, or something of that sort. At any rate, we'd better see what it is," he went on, taking a sheath-knife from one of the sailors and ripping the cloth open. "Tied to the body. By Jove! Why, this is mystery on mystery! Nothing in his pockets, no mark on his linen or clothes, and this thing tied to his body! Well, I suppose we may as well see what there is in it; and as you're the owner of the yacht and Deputy-Lieutenant of your county, I suppose I'd better hand it over to you."

As he said this he cut the cords and handed the tin box to Viscount Branston, who said as he took it:

"Of course, we shall have to open it, and we'll do it together after breakfast. Now, Mr Jackson, oblige me by having the body sewn up in a bit of canvas. I don't want the ladies to see it in that horrible state. And you may as well put on full speed; we don't want it on board any longer than we can help. Now, Lamson, come along and dress."

When they came out of their state-rooms they found the ladies already on deck, taking an ante-prandial stroll arm-in-arm. Lady Olive was a tall, perfectly-proportioned young woman of about twenty-five, not exactly pretty, but with a dark, strong, aristocratic face, which showed breeding in every line, and which was lighted up and relieved most pleasantly by a pair of soft, and yet brilliant, Irish eyes. When her features were in repose, some people would have called her handsome; when she smiled, others would have called her, not pretty, but charming—and they would have been about right.

Her companion, Miss Chrysie Vandel, daughter of Clifford K. Vandel, President of the American Electrical Storage Trust of Buffalo, N.Y., was an absolute contrast to her. She was about an inch shorter, exquisitely fair, and yet possessed of a pair of deep blue eyes, which in some lights looked almost black. Her brows were several shades darker than her hair, which was golden in the sun and brown in the shade. She was not what a connoisseur would call beautiful, for her features were just a trifle irregular, and her mouth was just ever so little too large. Still, taken as a whole, her face had that distracting and indescribable piquancy which seems to be the peculiar property of the well-bred American girl at her best.

Both were dressed in grey serge, short-skirted yachting suits, and each had a white duck yachting cap pinned to her hair.

"Well, Shafto," said Lady Olive, as the two men took their caps off, "and what is all this mystery about? Chrysie and I have been speculating all sorts of things."

"Why, yes, Lord Branston," chimed in Miss Chrysie. "I got out of my bath and fixed myself double quick, half expecting to come on deck and find ourselves held up by a French torpedo-boat, after all that talk we heard in Jersey about the trouble between you and France and Russia over China."

"I am happy to say it is not quite so serious as that, Miss Vandel," said Hardress, "and I hope we shall be able to get you safe to Southampton before the war starts. The fact is, about an hour ago, while Lamson and I were having our coffee on the bridge, he saw—well, the body of a man, terribly mangled, floating in the water. So we stopped to pick it up. It was frightfully mutilated, and, of course, it was nothing for eyes like yours to look upon, so we've had it sewn up in canvas, and we're taking it to Southampton to give it a decent burial."

"Now, I call that real good of you, Viscount. I guess you British have finer feelings in that way than we have. I don't believe Poppa would have stopped his yacht if he'd struck a whole burying lot afloat."

"Well," laughed Hardress; "that is what a busy man like your father might be expected to do. In fact, I suppose most Englishmen would have done so; but, as it happens, in this case virtue was rewarded—for we have discovered what may be a mystery."

"A mystery! Oh, do say, Viscount. That's just too lovely for words—a yacht, dead body at sea, and a mystery——"

"Yes," said Lamson; "and in a tin box, attached firmly by cords to corpse aforesaid."

"Don't, Mr Lamson; please don't," interrupted Lady Olive, somewhat severely. Then she went on, with a little shiver, "I hope, Shafto, you will get us to Southampton as quickly as you can. I don't want to be shipmates any longer than I can help with—with—ah—remains. It isn't lucky at sea, you know."

"My dear Olive," replied her brother, "about the first thing I thought of was that very idea; that is why we are now steaming full speed—twenty knots instead of eight—so that you and Miss Vandel may be relieved of this disquieting presence on board as soon as possible. And now, by way of passing the inconvenient hours that our new passenger will be with us, suppose we go to breakfast."

"A nice appetising sort of remark that, I must say, Viscount," said Miss Chrysie; "still I suppose we may as well go. This morning air at sea does make living people feel alive; I guess that's why I'm so hungry."

"And after breakfast, Shafto," said Lady Olive, "I presume that you will tell us all about the mystery of the tin box."

"My dear Olive," replied her brother, "it may be anything or nothing; and, as Lamson found it and gave it to me, instead of having it buried with the unknown deceased, I've agreed with him that we shall go through the contents, whatever they are, together; and, of course, if there's anything really interesting in them, then we shall tell you all about it."

"Now, that's real kind," said Miss Chrysie. "I guess if we don't have quite an interesting conversation over lunch it'll be the fault of our new passenger."

"My dear Chrysie," said Lady Olive, frigidly, "how can you! Really, you remind me rather strongly of what Kipling says about the Americans."

"And what might that be, Lady Olive?" she replied, looking up, with the flicker of a smile round her lips, and the twinkle of a challenge in her eyes.

"I don't think I remember the exact words just now, but I've got the 'Seven Seas' downstairs," replied Lady Olive; "but I think it's something about the cynic devil in his blood that bids him mock his hurrying soul."

"Thanks!" replied Miss Chrysie, with a toss of her shapely head, and an unmistakable sniff; "I think I've read that poem, too. Isn't there a verse in it that runs something this way?—

"'Inopportune, shrill-accented,

The acrid Asiatic mirth

That leaves him careless 'mid his dead,

The scandal of the elder earth.'"

She repeated the lines with such an exquisite exaggeration of the "shrill accent" that the two men burst out laughing, and Lady Olive first flushed up to her brows, and then also broke into a saving fit of laughter.

"That's a distinct score for Miss Vandel, Olive," said Hardress. "If you knew the whole poem a bit better, I don't think you'd have made that last remark of yours. But, of course, Miss Vandel will be generous and allow you to take the only way there is out of the difficulty—the way to breakfast."

"Why, certainly," said Miss Chrysie, who was trying hard not to laugh at her little triumph. "Kipling's good, but breakfast's better, in an air like this."

And so, as she would have put it, they "let it go at that," and went down into the saloon to breakfast.

CHAPTER IV

During breakfast it had been agreed that Lamson, as the discoverer of the mysterious tin box, should open it by himself, and, after examining its contents, report on them to Hardress.

This was a speculative suggestion, made by Lady Olive, seconded by Miss Chrysie, and so, perforce, agreed to. And thus it came about that all the essentials of Doctor Emil Fargeau's great discovery fell into the hands of a man who, by virtue of imagination, intellect, and scientific training, was the one man in Europe, perhaps in the world, who could either use it or abuse it to the best or worst advantage.

He took the box into his cabin, and opened it as carelessly as though it might have contained a few old love letters, or the story of some obsolete Anarchist conspiracy. But as soon as he had read the first page of the closely-written manuscript, he got up from his chair and locked the cabin door. As he went back to his seat, he caught a glimpse of his face in the mirror. It looked almost strange to him; so he stopped and looked at it again.

"Good Lord!" he muttered, "is that me?" And then he said aloud: "You infernal scoundrel!"

He didn't go back to the little table on which the manuscript was lying. He looked at the pages as a man might look at a cheque that he has just forged. His hand, which had never trembled before, trembled as he took his cigar-case out of his pocket; and as he lit the cigar he could hardly hold the match steadily. He dropped full length on the sofa, looked sideways at the fatal sheets of paper on the table, blew a long stream of smoke up towards the port-hole, and began to talk with his own soul.

"The Empire of the World. I've read enough to see that it comes to that. Yes, Faraday was right; and so was this poor wretch that we fished out of the water this morning. A Frenchman, an Alsatian, who has made the biggest discovery that ever was made, who has practically achieved a miracle, offers the result to his country and gets refused, and then, for some reason or other, commits it and his body to the deep!

"Curious, very curious, from anything like a scientific point of view. What an infinite mercy it is for us, who have reason to believe that we possess a little brains, that the majority of men are fools, and that the official person is usually a bigger fool than the man in the street. Now, suppose our unknown and deceased genius had put even that first page that I have read before our good friend Clifford K. Vandel instead of, I suppose, the French Minister of War. Jump—why, he'd have got into it with both feet, as they say in the States. A man worth millions. Oh, millions be hanged! How many millions could buy that? Of course, that's one way of looking at it—but Frank Lamson, as I said before, you're in the way of becoming an infernal scoundrel. Perhaps I'd better interrupt this little monologue, and read the rest of what our deceased genius has to say."

He reached out and took the papers off the table, and for an hour there was silence in the cabin. He read the sheets over and over again, making rapid mental calculations all the time. Then, after a long look at the open port-hole over the sofa, he folded the sheets up, and stuffed them into the hip-pocket of his trousers. Then he got up, and looked at himself in the glass again.

"You scoundrel!" he whispered at the ghastly image of himself. "You thief—you utter sweep—who would accept the hospitality of an old college chum, and then, when the possibility of illimitable millions, when the empire of the earth, the means of enslaving the whole human race, the absolute control of every civilised Power on earth, gets fished up by accident out of the waters of the English Channel, you think about robbing him of it. You are not fit to live, much less to——"

He flung himself down on the sofa again, with his hands clasped hard over his brow, and there he remained, without moving a limb, until he was called out of his waking dream by a rap on the cabin door and the sound of Hardress's voice saying:

"Come now, Lamson, buck up! Are you going to be all the morning getting through that tin box? The women folk are on the point of mutiny with curiosity to know what there is in it. Hurry up!" And then, with a sudden drop in the tone, "You're not ill, old man, are you?"

"All right, Hardress," he replied, in a voice which, by a supreme effort of will, he managed to keep steady. "I have had a bit of a shock—heart, I think. I wish you'd tell Evans to bring me a brandy-and-soda, will you?"

As he said this, he unlocked the cabin door, and as his host saw him he exclaimed:

"My dear fellow, you do look bad; sit down, and I'll get you the B.-and-S. myself in a moment."

He disappeared, and Lamson sat down again on the sofa. Again he looked up at the open port-hole. There were only a few moments left him now to decide what might really be the fate of the human race. No man had ever been face to face with such a tremendous responsibility before. No mortal had ever passed through such a terrible temptation as he had done during the last hour. Should he fling the priceless papers, the warrant for the mastery of the world, into the sea and be done with it? Should he keep them in his pocket and make untold millions out of the power that they placed in his hands? After all, he had discovered this priceless treasure-trove. But for him it would have been buried with the hideous relics of humanity lying in the forward hold sewn up in a canvas sack. Was it not his by right? Did any human law compel him to share it with anyone?

But, again, ought he or anyone else to be entrusted with such a tremendous power for good or evil as this?—the power, literally, to reduce mankind to slavery. He was a man of average morals himself; he had lived a clean, hard, studious life, and no man could say that he had done him a mean action. Hardress, too, was well up to the high standard of the British aristocracy—but his partner had married an American girl—the daughter of a man who had made millions out of railway developments after the Civil War. He was either in love or falling in love with the daughter of another American millionaire who had made his millions out of electrical storage. The first thing Hardress would do would be to take the papers over to America and put them before him. Clifford Vandel would grasp their gigantic possibilities instantly, a trust, commanding millions of capital, would be formed, and the world would become an American dependency.

"Here you are, old man," said Hardress, coming into the cabin with a long glass in his hand, "I've made it pretty stiff, because you look as if you wanted it. Why, what's the matter?"

Lamson took the glass, and as he put it to his lips Hardress saw his hand tremble and heard the glass rattle against his teeth. He drained it in two gulps, put it down on the table beside the sofa, threw himself back on the cushions at the end, looked once more at the open port-hole with the fate of a world on his soul, and said in a shaking voice:

"Lock the door, Hardress, and sit down. I've something to say to you."

"Why, my dear chap, what's up? You look positively ghastly," said the Viscount, as he closed the door and locked it.

"I don't suppose you'd look much better if you'd spent an hour in hell, as I have."

"An hour in—Oh, come now, old fellow," Hardress interrupted, with a look which Lamson instantly interpreted as a query as to his sanity. "Don't you think you'd better turn in for a bit? You really do look ill; just as if something had shaken you up very badly. Is it anything to do with that infernal tin box?" he went on, pointing to it on the table.

"Yes," said Lamson, pulling himself together with a struggle, and sitting up on the sofa. "I wish to heaven I hadn't got up just at that moment on the bridge and we'd left our unknown deceased to the mercy of the waves. But, even then, somebody else might have discovered it."

"Discovered what? The corpse?"

"Yes; and——Look here, Hardress, I've been horribly tempted—tempted, perhaps, as no other man ever was; but my father was a gentleman, and I'll do the straight thing. How would you like to be master of the world?"

"Master of the—Oh, look here, Lamson, this won't do at all, you know. You're as pale as a ghost; your eyes are burning, and your hands are shaking. You must have got a touch of fever, or something of that sort. Take a dose of quinine and turn in. We'll be at Southampton in two or three hours, and then you can see a doctor."

Lamson laughed. It was a laugh that wouldn't have done anybody much good to hear, and Hardress shivered a little as he heard it.

"I see what you mean. You think I'm a bit off my head. To tell you the truth, I almost wish I were, or that this infernal thing were only a dream—nightmare, I should say."

"What thing?"

"This," replied Lamson, putting his hand into his hip-pocket and pulling out some crumpled sheets of paper. "You thought I was mad when I asked you if you'd like to be master of the world. When you've read that you'll see that you can be. They're what I found in that tin box. There's no name or address or any mark of identification on them, but they were written by a man, a Frenchman, who has discovered a means, as one might say, of soaking up all the electricity of the earth in one huge storage system, and then doling it out to the peoples of the earth like gas or water or electric light."

"Great Scott, what a gorgeous idea!" exclaimed Hardress, jumping from his seat and holding out his hand for the papers. "Why do you want to get ill over a thing like that, man? Don't you see there are millions in it if it's true, and of course you'll come in on the ground-floor? Great Caesar's ghost! It'll be the very thing for old Vandel. The Morgan Steel Trust won't be in it with this."

"I thought you'd say that," said Lamson. "That's the American blood talking in you. Now, I'll tell you candidly that I've only given you those papers from a sense of honour and friendship. I admit that my first impulse was to throw them out of the port-hole; and my second," he went on, after a little pause, "was to keep them to myself, and tell you some lie about the box being empty."

"You might have done the first, old man, but you couldn't have done the second," replied Hardress, putting the papers into his hand. "There, take them back; I don't suppose I should understand them. Anyhow, you can make a better use of them than I can; and if there's anything in it we'll share alike. In fact, after all, the whole thing really belongs to you, for if you hadn't discovered the body, it might have drifted around till it went down to feed the fishes. Really, I don't see what there is to be so upset about in it."

"My dear fellow, hasn't it struck you yet," said Lamson, "that if this discovery works out all right, as I'm certain it will, it will really mean, as I said just now, the mastery of the world? For instance, to put the thing into a nut-shell: Here we are, on this seven-hundred-ton yacht of yours, steaming at a speed of eighteen or twenty knots, engines working smoothly, and so on. Now, if this man's scheme were put into practice, the Nadine would be, as I might say, for want of a better word, electrolised. That is to say, every atom of metal in her would lose its tone; the boilers would burst, the engines fly to pieces, and even the hull would splinter up into a thousand fragments, just as though she were made of glass, and she got hit with a hundred sledge-hammers at the same minute."

"Is that really so, Lamson? Are you quite serious?" said Hardress, gravely, for he was just beginning to grasp the enormous possibilities of the discovery. "Do you really mean to say that that is actually feasible? Of course, I know what a swell you are at these subjects, and I don't suppose for a moment that you would say it if you didn't believe it; but are you quite sure that your—well, that this scientific imagination that I've heard you talk about hasn't run away with you?"

"My dear Hardress," replied Lamson, getting up from the couch, "there is no imagination whatever about this. I can assure you it is just a matter of hard facts and figures. Whoever that poor fellow was that we're going to bury at Southampton, it's quite certain that the world has lost one of its most brilliant physical scholars. The man who discovered this scheme and worked it out in these papers was a second Newton or Faraday. In short, I can tell you in all seriousness—I will pledge my reputation, such as it is—that, granted the necessary capital, which would certainly run to a million or two, I could work this scheme out myself. I could construct works that would mop up the electricity out of the earth as a sponge takes water. I could change climates as I pleased. I could hurl my thunders where I chose like a very Jove. I could make myself arbiter of life and death on earth. In fact, I could be everything that a mortal ought not to be."

"There; I can't say that I quite agree with you," said Hardress. "Personally, I can't see why a man shouldn't be all that he can be, and there's no reason why you and I and the governor and Chrysie's dad shouldn't syndicate this business and run the earth. You say it's possible. That's good enough for me. We'll find the millions and you'll find the brains, so we'll consider that settled. Fancy picking a thing like that up out of the sea on a pleasure cruise! Talk about luck! Well, come along; let's go and break it as gently as we can to the girls."

CHAPTER V

The Nadine had been lying for a fortnight in Southampton Water, and all that was mortal of the man who might have been master of the world was resting in a nameless grave in the cemetery.

In the oak-panelled dining-room of Orrel Court, an old rambling mansion, dating partly from Reformation times, and standing on the lower slopes of the South Downs overlooking the distant Solent, there was a little dinner-party in the process of eating, drinking, and chatting, which was a good deal more pregnant with the fate of nations than many a Cabinet meeting.

At the head of the long, massive table sat a man of a little over fifty, tall and rather squarely built, and still erect. A man, still handsome and capable of attracting the attention and even the admiration of many fair ladies, who would have been only too glad to occupy the place at the other end of the table which was now occupied by the owner of the Nadine, for Harry Shafto Hardress, eighth Earl of Orrel, came of one of the oldest and proudest stocks in the country, and, thanks to the millions which his dead American wife had brought him, the broad, fat acres that he owned in half-a-dozen counties were absolutely unencumbered, and he possessed a personal fortune that yielded more than twice his goodly rent-roll.

Miss Chrysie Vandel sat at his right hand, and, next to her, Doctor Lamson, faced by Lady Olive and a tall, angular, square-headed, keen-featured man of about the Earl's own age, with a heavy, well-trained, iron-grey, moustache, and an equally well-ordered, little tuft of hair on the square chin. This was Clifford K. Vandel, President of the Empire State Electric Storage and Transmission Trust of New York and Buffalo. He was commonly known throughout the States and Europe as the Lightning King; and he controlled not only the power distribution, but also the whole system of Etherography or wireless telegraphy throughout the Continent of North America.

He had come over post-haste from New York in response to an urgent cable from Lord Orrel. He was an uncle of the late Lady Orrel, and he and the Earl had already done a good deal of business together on both sides of the Atlantic. The cablegram had contained the words "urgent business," so he had taken the first available steamer and arrived in Southampton that afternoon.

During dinner only ordinary topics had been touched upon, but when the cloth was removed and the butler, with a ceremonious care that was almost reverential, had placed the ancient decanters and jugs containing the port and claret and Madeira, for which the cellars of Orrel Court had long been famous, his lordship told him that they were not to be disturbed until he rang; and, when the door had closed behind him, he said:

"Well, now, Vandel, we can talk. Miss Chrysie, a glass of port—allow me—and, if you will, pass the decanter. Mr Lamson, this is the same seal as before. Olive, you will make the coffee later on, won't you, in that patent concern of yours? You certainly do it much better than they do downstairs; and I don't see why for once we shouldn't have our smoke here, since our—what is it they say?—revolting daughters both indulge."

"Revolted, if you don't mind, my lord," remarked Miss Chrysie across her wine-glass. "Though I don't see much what Olive and I want to revolt for; and I guess if two girls ever had more easily managed poppas they'd be curiosities. What do you say poppa? You haven't tried to run me much, have you?"

The iron-faced man of millions, the commander-in-chief of armies of hand and brain workers, the ruthless wrecker of industries which stood in the way of the realisation of his gigantic schemes, looked smilingly at the living likeness of his dead wife, and said, with that soft intonation and hardly perceptible accent which evidenced his old Southern descent:

"Well, Chrysie, I don't know that either of you ever wanted very much running; and as for smoking, well, your mothers and grandmothers did it down South two generations ago, and I guess what was good enough for the South in those days is good enough for anywhere else."

From which speech it may be gathered that Clifford Kingsley Vandel was one of those Americans who, although he had come in with the Union, and made many millions out of it, still cherished the traditions of the old Southern aristocracy. In fact, in his heart of hearts, no man, saving only perhaps Louis Xavier de Condé and his present host, had a greater contempt for all democratic institutions than he had; a contempt which is amply shared by nine out of ten of the dollar despots of the great Republic.

He helped himself to a glass of the pale ruby-coloured port, and passed the decanter to Hardress. Lady Olive was taking claret.

"And now," said Lord Orrel, raising his glass, "suppose we begin in the good old-fashioned way. Here's success to the Storage Trust and all its future developments."

"Which, from what I've heard of them, will be big and go far," said the Lightning King.

"Even unto the running of the earth, and all that therein is. Is that good American, Chrysie?"

"Not quite," she laughed, in reply. "I must say that your ladyship seems to have considerable difficulty in picking up the American language. However, the sentiment's all right, so we'll let it go at that. What do you say, Doctor? Somehow you don't seem quite as enthusiastic about this as a man who knows everything might be."

"If a man knew everything, Miss Vandel," replied Lamson, rather gravely, "he would probably be enthusiastic about nothing. Still, I confess that, as I said at first on board the yacht, I do look upon this scheme, splendid and all as it is, and perfectly feasible from the scientific point of view, as something just a little too splendid for human responsibility. After all, you know, to make oneself the arbiter of human destiny, supreme lord of earth and air, dispenser of life and death, health and sickness, is what is popularly described as a somewhat large order."

"Well," chimed in Miss Chrysie, "I guess if it enables you to reform the British climate, by way of a start, and give this unhappy country some weather instead of just a lot of ragged-edged samples, you'll not begin badly."

"And if we can also do something with the furious, untamed, American blizzard," laughed Hardress, nodding at her over his glass, "we shall also confer a certain amount of blessing upon a not inconsiderable proportion of the Anglo-Saxon race. What's your idea, Mr Vandel?"

"We could do about as well without them as London could do without fog, or the British farmer do without a week of January shifted on into May," replied the Lightning King. "I've often thought that a syndicate which could control the British climate, and educate your farmers and railroads into something like commonsense, would make quite big money. Maybe that's what we'll do later on."

"An excellent idea," laughed Lord Orrel. "I have suffered from both of them—as well as from our free-trading amateur politicians who make it as expensive for me to bring a ton of my own wheat from Yorkshire to London as to import a ton of yours from Chicago. However, we shall be able to alter that later on. And now, suppose Olive brews the coffee, and we have a cigar, and then, perhaps, Mr Lamson will oblige us by shedding the light of his knowledge on the subject before the meeting. I suppose, Mr Lamson, you have not found, on more mature study of the question, that there are any serious objections to the scheme, saving, of course, the one which your modesty has created?"

"No, Lord Orrel," he replied, with one of his grave smiles. "During the last week or so I have worked out, I think, every possible development of the scheme, and I am bound to say that the unknown genius whom we buried the other day has left nothing to chance. There is not even a speculation. Everything is fact, figure, and demonstration. Given the capital, and the concessions from the Canadian Government, there does not appear to me the remotest chance of failure. The ultimate consequences of putting the scheme into practice are, of course, quite another affair—but on that subject you already have my opinion."

"My dear Lamson," said Hardress, "that, if you will pardon me saying so, is merely one of the characteristic failings of the scientific intellect. It has too much imagination, and therefore looks too far ahead."

"I'm with you there, Viscount," said the Lightning King. "This is just a question of dollars first, last, and all the time. Of course, we've got to see the other side of it; but we're not concerned much with what there is beyond—or back of beyond, for that matter. So, as practical men, we'll just respect the doctor's scruples all they deserve, and take all the help he can give us."

"Exactly," said Lord Orrel; "you put the case with your usual terseness, Vandel. And now, if you won't have any more wine, Olive will give us some coffee, and we may light up and get to business."

"And, Lamson, you will consider yourself on deck for the present," added Hardress. "I can see that Mr Vandel is just dying to know the details, in spite of that cast-iron self-control of his."

"My dear Viscount," laughed the multi-millionaire, "I'm among friends, and I'm not controlling any just now. Still, I'll admit that I'm just about as anxious to know the details of this scheme as Chrysie was to try on her first ball-dress, and that was no small circumstance, I tell you."

"I should think not," laughed Lady Olive. "There's only one thing more important in life than that, and that's a wedding-dress. But if these people are going to immerse themselves in facts and figures, Chrysie, suppose we have our coffee up in my room. I want to have a good talk with you about the presentation dresses."

"An even more weighty subject," laughed Hardress, "than the wedding-dress—which may never be worn. I mean, of course——"

"I guess I wouldn't try and explain, Viscount," said Miss Chrysie, as she got up and went towards the door. "Wasn't it your Lord Beaconsfield who said that the most dreary duty of humanity was explanation? Reckon you'll find it pretty dreary work explaining that remark away."

Hardress looked distinctly uncomfortable, for there was a flush on Miss Chrysie's cheeks, and a glint in her eyes which, although they made her look distractingly pretty, were not of great promise to him.

"I'm awfully sorry——" he began.

"My dear Shafto," laughed Lady Olive, as Lamson opened the door for them, "don't attempt it. A man who could make a remark like that could not possibly improve the situation by an apology."

With that they disappeared, and Lamson shut the door. When he got back to his seat he took a lot of papers out of the breast-pocket of his coat, put his plate aside, laid them on the table, and said:

"Well, then, since I am in the chair, I may as well get to business. As Mr Vandel has not yet been made fully acquainted with the details of the scheme, perhaps it will be as well if I begin at the beginning."

"Quite so," said Lord Orrel, with a nod; "and your kindness will have the additional effect of refreshing my own memory, which, I must admit, is not a particularly good one for technicalities."

Then Doctor Lamson began, and for a couple of hours or so expounded with every possible exactness of detail the discovery made by the man whose mangled remains had been picked up by the Nadine in mid-Channel, and which might have made France mistress of the world.

When he had finished, they went into the library, where they were joined by Lady Olive and Miss Chrysie, and the conversation gradually drifted away into topics more socially interesting, but of less imperial importance. But when Clifford Kingsley Vandel went to bed that night he spent half-an-hour or more walking up and down his big, thickly-carpeted bedroom, with his hands clasped behind his back, his eyes fixed on the floor, and his lips shaping inarticulate words which would have been worth millions to anyone who could have heard them. Then he stopped his promenade, undressed, and got into bed, and just before he dismissed the whole subject from his perfectly-trained intellect and addressed himself to the necessary business of sleep, he said:

"Well, that's just about the biggest scheme that mortal man ever had a chance of bringing to a head; and I guess we'll do it. Masters of the world, givers of life or death, lords of the nations, makers of peace or war as we please! That's so, and now, Clifford Vandel, I have the honour to wish you a very good night—a very good night indeed—about the best night you've ever had."

And then the masterful brain ceased working, like an engine from which the steam had been shut off, and he fell asleep as quickly and as peacefully as a little child.

CHAPTER VI

Miss Chrysie's European visit had come to an end, and she and her father had accepted Hardress's invitation to take a trip home in the Nadine. Doctor Lamson was also a guest on board, and during the trip many of the details of the great scheme were exhaustively discussed. Each of the three men was going on a special mission. Clifford Vandel had definitely accepted the position of president and general financial and business manager of the International Magnetic Control Syndicate, as the newly-formed company had been provisionally named. He was going to the States to do the necessary financial part of the work, buy up rights and patents which might be necessary to the furtherance of the scheme, and to perfect the organisation of the great combine of which he was president—a combine whose influence was now to extend not only over the United States, but over the whole world.

Doctor Lamson was going to make a personal study of the electrical machinery to be found in the States, so that he might be in a position to design the great storage works to the best advantage and with the greatest possible economy of time and money.

Hardress, armed with introductions from the highest official sources in England, was going northward, after leaving his guests at New York, to Montreal, to obtain a lease of a few square miles of the desolate, ice-covered wilderness of Boothia Felix, which, as a glance at the map will show you, is the most northerly portion of the mainland of the American continent. Further, in its scanty history, you may read that there Sir John Ross discovered the magnetic pole of the earth, and named the wilderness after his friend Sir Felix Booth, who had furnished most of the funds for his expedition.

His ostensible object in obtaining the lease was the foundation of an observatory for the examination of magnetic and electrical phenomena; one of which was the possible solution of the so far unsolved riddle of the Northern Lights. He also stated to the Dominion authorities, by way of giving something like a practical air to his mission, that a remoter possibility of the scheme was the establishment of a magnetic centre for a world-wide system of wireless telegraphy.

The few square miles of ice and snow and rock were absolutely worthless, and so the Dominion Government had not the slightest hesitation in accepting his offer of a thousand a year for ten years for the exclusive use and possession of the peninsula, with right to import materials, construct works, and do whatever might be necessary for the development of the scheme.

If he had not been the heir to an ancient peerage and the son of one of the wealthiest men in England, he would probably have been looked upon as a harmless crank who was wanting to lose his money in a vain attempt to harness the electrical energy displayed in the Aurora borealis and make thunderstorms to order out of it. As it was, he was treated indulgently as a man who had big ideas, and who was conducting at his own expense a great scientific experiment which he could very well afford to pay for.

Thus, after very brief negotiations, consisting of one or two interviews, two or three dinners, and the handing over of a cheque, the Canadian Government in all innocence parted with what was soon to prove the most precious piece of land, not only on the American Continent, but in the whole world.

But this was not the only concession that Shafto Hardress took back to England with him. For when he returned to New York and took a run up to Buffalo on the Empire State Express, with the lease of Boothia Land in his pocket, to talk matters over with President Vandel, he had a brief but momentously interesting interview with Miss Chrysie, at the close of which she said, as her hand rested in his:

"Well, Viscount, I'm not going to say 'Yes' right away. You're a gentleman, and I like you. You're going to be a peer of England some day, and, if this scheme of yours works out all right, one of the masters of the world. As my father's daughter I have no natural objection to being a peeress of England and mistress of the world, but I am also a natural-born woman, and I want a little more than that—I mean something that a man could not give me if he owned the Solar System. I want to know for certain that you love me as a man should love a woman, and that I can love you as a woman should love a man if she is going to marry him. I like you; yes, I like you better than any other man I've ever seen. I tell you quite honestly it hasn't been a case of love at first sight with me, and I guess I haven't known you quite long enough to give you something that I can never take back. Go to your work and do it, and while you're doing it we shall get to know each other better, and meanwhile you may consider that you have the option of another piece of half-discovered territory."

Before releasing her hand he stooped and kissed it, saying, with a laugh that bespoke a certain amount of satisfaction:

"That, you know, is—well, we will call it the seal on the contract. This is my act and deed, you understand—as people say when they conclude a contract with an option. A definition of kissing which I once read describes it as equivalent to syllabus."

"Syllabus!" she said, releasing her hand and raising it to her brow, pushing a fold of hair back by the motion and smiling up at him in a somewhat disconcerted fashion. "And what might that mean in your dictionary of kisses?"

"It was defined as kissing the hand of the girl you want very badly instead of——"

Her red lips smiled an irresistible challenge at him, and the next instant his arm was round her waist, and he said:

"After all, I don't think that contract was properly signed, sealed, and delivered; at least, the seal was in the wrong place, and the delivery was not quite complete."

"Now I call that real mean, Viscount," she said, a moment afterwards. "I only gave you an option on the territory, and you're starting to occupy it right away."

"Well, then," he said, taking her hand again, "suppose, instead of the territory, we call it a reserve. How will that do?"

"Not quite," she said, drawing back a bit. "To some extent I've been taken by assault, but I've not surrendered at discretion yet. That sounds a bit mixed, I know—but it's pretty near the truth."

"And at that," he said, gravely smiling, "I am quite content to leave it." And so, with the magical touch of her lips still thrilling through his blood, he left her, more than ever determined to fulfil to the utmost the tremendous destiny which chance had cast in his way.

To him there could have been no more delightfully satisfactory ending to his mission. In blood he was himself half-American, and in him the old-world aristocrat was strangely blended with the keen, far-seeing, quick-witted, hard-headed, and perhaps, in one sense, hard-hearted man of business. It was to this side of his nature that the physical charms, the keen wit, and sprightly spirit of Miss Chrysie had first appealed; but later on the aristocrat in him had recognised that she too was a patrician of the New World, whose ancestry stretched back into the history of the old, and so gradually interest and admiration had grown into a love which completely satisfied all his instincts.

The very way in which she had received his proposal had increased both his love and his respect. If she had surrendered at discretion there might have remained the possibility of a suspicion that, after all, she had been tempted to take hold of a magnificent opportunity, not only for placing herself in the front rank of European society, but also of wielding through her husband a power such as no woman had ever exercised before. But she had given him frankly to understand that these things were as nothing in her eyes, great and splendid as they were, without that certainty of mutual love which could alone induce her to give herself, body and soul, into the hands of any man, however powerful or nobly born; for Chrysie Vandel was a woman in the best sense of that much-meaning word, and she knew that for her there was no choice, save between the complete independence of thought and action which she had so far enjoyed, and an equally complete surrender to the man to whom she could render, whole-hearted and unreserved, the sweet service of love.

After dinner that night he had an equally satisfactory interview with the president, who, when he had heard his story, just got up from his chair and said:

"Viscount, we'll shake on that. My girl's free to choose where she likes, or not to choose at all, and you are not going to have any help from me in the way of persuasion; but if she does choose, why, I'd sooner she chose you than any other man I know."

"I ask for nothing better, I can assure you," said Hardress. "Thank you a thousand times."

And so they shook.

The next day by noon the Nadine was steaming out past Sandy Hook. Allowing for difference in longitude, it was almost at the same moment that the night mail pulled out of the Petersburg station. Two of the sleeping-compartments were occupied by Prince Xavier de Condé and his daughter; and so, from the ends of the earth, both travelling towards an obscure little watering-place hidden away in the depths of the German forest land, were approaching each other the man and the woman whose destinies had been, all unknown to themselves, so strangely linked together by the last despairing act of the man whose country had refused to permit him to make her the mistress of the world.

CHAPTER VII

The village of Elsenau, which has hardly yet risen to the dignity of a town, lies somewhere midway between the Hartz Mountains and the Thuringia Wald, which, as everyone knows, stretches away in undulations of wooded uplands and valleys southward to the Black Forest. Its most recent possession is the fine Hôtel Wilhelmshof—an entirely admirable creation of the German instinct for catering, facing south-west, and sheltered north and east by uplands crowned with stately pines. Southward it has smooth, new-made lawns, dotted with clumps of firs and parterres of flowers, shielded by curves of flowering bushes. The lawns slope down to the edge of a long narrow lake, which, on the evening of the day after the prince and the marquise left Petersburg, lay smooth and blue-black beneath the cloudless azure of the summer heaven.

But the principal attraction of Elsenau, which, indeed, had given the luxurious hotel its reason for existence, and which had raised the little village of charcoal-burners and woodcutters to the dignity of a Kur-anstalt, was a spring, accidentally discovered by an enterprising engineer who was looking among the mountains for a water-supply for the city of Ilmosheim, some three miles away to the south. The waters had a curious taste and a most unpleasant smell. Learned chemists and doctors analysed them, and reported that they contained ingredients which formed a sovereign remedy for gout and rheumatism—especially the hereditary form of the first. They were bottled and sent far and wide, and soon after their qualities had been duly appreciated and commented on by the medical press of Europe and America, the Hôtel Wilhelmshof rose, as it were, with the wave of the contractor's magic wand, hard by the little limestone grotto in which the spring had been discovered.

About eight o'clock on a lovely evening in July, Lord Orrel and Lady Olive, under the broad verandah of the Wilhelmshof, sat drinking their after-dinner coffee and watching the full moon sailing slowly up over the black ridges of the pine-crowned hills which stretched away to the southward.

"I suppose the prince must have missed his train, or else the train was behind time and missed the coach," said Lord Orrel, taking out his watch. "It is rather curious that I should have met him regularly every year at Homburg or Spa or Aix, and that somehow you have never met him; and now it seems from his letter that we have both discovered this new little place of evil-smelling waters together. I am glad that he is bringing his daughter with him."

"Ah, yes; his daughter—she is the second Marie Antoinette, isn't she?" said Lady Olive, putting her cup down and taking up her cigarette. "The most beautiful woman in Europe, the last daughter of the old House of Bourbon—I mean the elder branch, of course. And the prince?"

"The first gentleman in Europe, in my opinion," replied the earl, flicking the ash off his cigar. "A man who, granted the possibility of circumstances which, of course, are not now possible, might mount the throne of Louis XIV., and receive the homage of all his courtiers without their knowing the difference. A great man, my dear Olive, born four generations out of his time. If he had succeeded the Grand Monarque—there would have been no French Revolution, no Napoleon——"

"And therefore, my dear papa," laughed Lady Olive, "no Peninsular War, no Wellington, no Waterloo, no Nelson, no Nile and Trafalgar, and so none of that expiring British supremacy which you were arguing about so eloquently the other day in the House of Lords."

While she was speaking, the double doors giving on to the verandah were thrown open, a lacquey, gorgeously uniformed in blue and silver, came out, with his body inclined at an angle of thirty degrees, and his arms hanging straight down, and said, in thick Swiss French:

"Your Excellency and Madame la Marquise will find Milord and Miladi on the verandah here."

As Lady Olive looked round she heard a rustle of frilled skirts on the planks of the verandah, and saw a tall, stately gentleman and the most beautiful woman she had ever seen coming towards her.

The gentleman's eyes brightened and his brows lifted as he raised his hat. The woman's face might have been a mask, and her eyes looked out upon nothingness.

"Ah, my dear prince," said the earl, rising and going towards him with outstretched hands. "Delighted to renew our acquaintance in a new and yet a very charming place. I was hoping that you would get here for dinner; but, of course, once off the main line, you can never trust a German train to get anywhere in time. And this is Mam'selle la Marquise, I presume. This is fortunate. You see I have my daughter Olive taking care of me, so perhaps they may help to entertain each other in this out-of-the-way place."

"Yes," replied the prince, as they shook hands, "this is my daughter of whom I have spoken to you so often; and this is yours, the Lady Olive. Mam'selle, I have the honour to salute you. Adelaide, this is the daughter of Lord Orrel—an old friend, and one of the ancienne noblesse."

Olive had risen while he was speaking; the mask melted away from the marquise's lovely face, her lips softened into a smile, and a swift gleam of scrutiny took the place of vacancy in her eyes. Lady Olive's met hers with a frank though involuntary look of challenge. She certainly was what the gossip of half-a-dozen countries called her—the most beautiful woman in Europe. She possessed an exquisite grace of form and face and manner which made her indescribable. When one woman honestly admires another it is always with a half-conceived sense either of envy or hostility. Lady Olive was herself one of the best types of an English patrician, and the blood in her veins had flowed through ten generations of the proudest lineage in Britain; but in Adelaide de Condé, the daughter of the most ancient aristocracies of France and Austria, she instinctively recognised her equal, perhaps her superior.

She put out her hand in a frank, English way, and said, in the most perfectly accented French:

"My father has told me so much about yours, and they are such good friends, that I hope it isn't possible that we can be anything else."

"Quite impossible!" smiled the marquise, taking the hand of the new-made friend who in days to come was to be an enemy. "Since our fathers are such old and good friends, why should we not be new friends and good ones too?" And then, turning round to her father, she said: "Voila, papa, since we find ourselves in such good company, and we have missed the dinner, and cannot eat till they get something ready, why do you not have your vermouth and a cigarette? In fact, as we are so entirely 'chez nous' here in this delightful retreat, you may order one for me too, I think."

The prince lifted his eyelids, and the lacquey approached and took his order, and then the party proceeded to make friends.

A little after tea the same evening, when Lady Olive and the marquise had retired to Lady Olive's sitting-room for a chat on things feminine and European, Lord Orrel and the prince were strolling up and down the moonlit lawn, smoking their cigars and exchanging the experiences that they had had since their last meeting at Homburg the year before.

Their friendship had begun by a chance acquaintance some six years before at Aix-les-Bains. Both of them aristocrats to their finger-tips, it was not long before they struck a note of common sympathy. The once splendid name which the prince bore appealed instantly to the Englishman, who could trace his descent back to the days of the first Plantagenet, and it was not long before they found a closer bond than that of ancient ancestry.

One night, when the beach at Trouville was lit up by just such a moon as was now floating high over the pines on the hills round Elsenau, he had told the prince the story of his life—the story of an elder scion of an ancient line devoted rather to literature and the byways of science than to the political and social duties of his position, and, moreover, a man who had never found a woman whom his heart could call to his side to share it with him. He had devoted his after-college days to study and travel. His younger brother, a splendid specimen of English chivalry, had found his mate in the daughter of his father's oldest friend. He was a soldier, and when the Franco-German war broke out, nothing, not even the longing, half-reproachful looks of his betrothed, could keep him from volunteering in the French service. He had fought through the war with brilliant distinction, a private at Saarbruck and a captain during the Siege of Paris. Then, captured, badly wounded, by the Germans after a brilliant sortie, he was cured and released, only to be murdered by the communards on the eve of his return to England. A year or two after, the Earl abjured his vows of celibacy under the fascinations of a brilliant American beauty, and so had accepted the responsibility of perpetuating his race.

So these two men had met on common ground, and nothing was more natural than that they should have become such friends as they were. To a very great extent they stood apart from the traditions of their times. They were aristocrats in an age of almost universal democracy. Both of them firmly believed that democracy spelt degeneration, national and individual. Both of them were, in fact, incarnations of an age that was past, and which might or might not be renewed.

This was, indeed, the subject of their conversation as they strolled up and down the smoothly-shaven lawn under the sheltering pines, chatting easily and comparing in well-selected phrases the things of their own youth with those of the present swiftly moving and even a trifle blatant generations of to-day.

"I quite agree with you, my dear Lord Orrel," said the prince, as they turned at the end of their walk. "Democracy is tending now, just as it did in the days of Greece and Carthage and Rome, and to-day in my own unhappy France, to degeneration, and the worst of it is that there is no visible possibility of salvation. Our rulers have armed the mob with a weapon more potent than the thunders of Jove. The loafer of the café and the pot-house has a vote, and, therefore, the same voice in choosing the rulers of nations as the student and the man of science, or the traveller who is familiar with many lands and many races. I often think that it is a pity that some means cannot be found for placing—well, I will call it a despotic power—in the hands of a few men—men, for instance, if I may say so without flattery or vanity, like ourselves—men of wide experience and broad sympathies, and yet possessing what you and I know to be the essentials of despotism—that something that can only be inherited, not acquired."

"My dear prince, I agree with you entirely," replied Lord Orrel. "Our present civilisation is suffering from a sort of dry-rot. Sentiment has degenerated into sentimentalism, courage into a reckless gambling for honours, statesmanship into politics, oratory into verbosity. In short, the nineteenth century has degenerated into the twentieth. Everything seems going wrong. The world is ruled by the big man who shots his quotations on the Stock Exchange and the little one who serves behind his counter. It is all buying and selling. Honour and faith, and the old social creed which we used to call noblesse oblige, are getting quite out of date."

"Not that yet, my friend, surely," the prince interrupted, quickly gripping his companion's arm; "not that, at least, for us. I confess that we and those like us are, as one might say, derelicts on the ocean of society—we, who one day were stately admirals, to use the old phrase. And yet, as you said just now, if only some power could be placed in the hands of a few like ourselves, a power which would over-ride the blind, irresponsible, shifting will of the mutable mob which changes its vote and its opinions with the seasons, the world might be brought again into order, and the proletariat might be saved from its own suicide.

"And," he went on, turning at the other end of their promenade, "perhaps you will not believe me, but only a few weeks ago there was such a power in the hands of a Frenchman—of an Alsatian, perhaps I should say, but a man who had preserved his loyalty to France—a scientist of European reputation—a man who had discovered that this earth had a spirit, a living soul, and who could gain control of it—so complete a control, that he could draw it out and leave the earth dead—a man who—But there, I am wearying you; I am sure you must think that I am telling you some fairy tale."

"By no means, my dear prince," said Lord Orrel, doing his best to keep his voice steady, and not quite succeeding. "In the first place, I am quite sure that you would not speak so seriously on a subject that was not serious; and, in the second place, I can assure you that I am most deeply interested."

"A thousand pardons, my lord," said the prince. "Of course you would not think that of me. We have both of us lived too long to indulge in romance, and yet, if I could tell you the whole story, you would say that you have never heard such a romance as this."

"And, if it is not trespassing too far upon your confidence, my dear prince, I should be only too happy to hear you tell the whole story," said his lordship, with an unmistakable note of curiosity in his tone.

"I can tell you part of the story," replied the prince; "but not here. It is so strange, and it might have meant so much, not only to France, but to the world, that I can only tell it to you where no other ears than ours can hear it, and even then only under your solemn pledge of secrecy."

"As for the first condition, my dear prince," replied Lord Orrel, "I will ask you to take a glass of wine with me in my sitting-room. As for the second, you have my word."

"And, therefore, both conditions are amply satisfied. Let us go, and I will tell you the strangest story you have ever heard."

CHAPTER VIII

By the time the prince had ceased speaking there was not the slightest doubt in Lord Orrel's mind that, in some most mysterious manner, he was connected with the discovery which Hardress had made when he took the mutilated body out of the waters of the Channel. Perhaps even the unknown dead might have been someone near and dear to him. It seemed to him utterly impossible either to doubt the prince's word or to believe that two such discoveries could have been made by two men at the same time, or even that there could exist at the same time on earth two men whose genius, once put into practice, could make them rival masters of the world.

And supposing that he knew part of the story which the prince was going to tell him—the sequel, and, from a practical point of view, the all-important portion—ought he to tell him what he knew too? He was under no actual pledge of secrecy to his associates in the great Trust, but still he felt that he was under an honourable obligation to keep the story of the discovery to himself. On the other hand, granted that the prince knew the first half, would it be right—would it be honourable, according to his own exact code of honour, to keep the sequel from him? Perhaps the prince even had a definite personal interest in the scheme; and, in that case, to keep silence would be to rob him of his prior rights. What was he to do?