Neeland turned and looked at Rue, who, conscious of his excitement,
flushed brightly, yet never suspecting what he was about to say.
The Princess said quietly: "Yes, tell her, Jim. It is better she should know. Until now it has
not been necessary to mention the matter, or I should have done so."
Rue, surprised, still prettily flushed with expectancy, looked with
new curiosity from one to the other.
Neeland said: "Ilse Dumont, known on the stage as Minna Minti, is the divorced wife
of Eddie Brandes."
At the mention of a name so long hidden away, buried in her memory,
and almost forgotten, the girl quivered and straightened up, as though
an electric shock had passed through her body.
Then a burning colour flooded her face as at the swift stroke of a
lash, and her grey eyes glimmered with the starting tears.
"You'll have to know it, darling," said the Princess in a low voice.
"There is no reason why you should not; it no longer can touch you.
Don't you know that?"
"Y-yes----" Ruhannah's slowly drooping head was lifted again; held
high; and the wet brilliancy slowly dried in her steady eyes.
"Before I tell you," continued Neeland, "what happened to me through
Ilse Dumont, I must tell you what occurred in the train on my way to
Paris.... May I have a cigarette, Princess Naïa?"
"At your elbow in that silver box."
Rue Carew lighted it for him with a smile, but her hand still
trembled.
"First," he said, "tell me what particular significance those papers
in the olive-wood box have. Then I can tell you more intelligently
what happened to me since I went to Brookhollow to find them."
"They are the German plans for the fortification of the mainland
commanding the Dardanelles, and for the forts dominating the Gallipoli
peninsula."
"Yes, I know that. But of what interest to England or France or
Russia----"
"If there is to be war, can't you understand the importance to us of
those plans?" asked the Princess in a low, quiet voice.
"To--'us'?" he repeated.
"Yes, to us. I am Russian, am I not?"
"Yes. I now understand how very Russian you are, Princess. But what
has Turkey----"
"What is Turkey?"
"An empire----"
"No. A German province."
"I did not know----"
"That is what the Ottoman Empire is today," continued the Princess
Mistchenka, "a Turkish province fortified by Berlin, governed from
Berlin through a Germanised Turk, Enver Pasha; the army organised,
drilled, equipped, officered, and paid by the Kaiser Wilhelm; every
internal resource and revenue and development and projected
development mortgaged to Germany and under German control; and the
Sultan a nobody!"
"I did not know it," repeated Neeland.
"It is the truth, mon ami. It is inevitable that Turkey fights if
Germany goes to war. England, France, Russia know it. Ask yourself,
then, how enormous to us the value of those plans--tentative, sketchy,
perhaps, yet the inception and foundation of those German-made and
German-armed fortifications which today line the Dardanelles and the
adjacent waters within the sphere of Ottoman influence!"