For the last eight months, I have been living part of the
time in Berlin and part of the time in a country house near the Black
Forest."
"Alone?"
"Not a bit of it! I have been governess to the two daughters of Herr
Essendorf."
"Essendorf, the President of the German Republic?"
Lady Maggie nodded.
"He isn't a bit like his pictures. He is a huge fat man and he eats a
great deal too much. Oh, the horror of those meals!" she added, with a
little shudder. "Think of me, dear Nigel, who never eat more than an
omelette and some fruit for luncheon, compelled to sit down every day to
a _mittagessen_! I wonder I have any digestion left at all."
"Do you mean that you were there under your own name?" he asked
incredulously.
She shook her head.
"I secured some perfectly good testimonials before I left," she said.
"They referred to a Miss Brown, the daughter of Prebendary Brown. I was
Miss Brown."
"Great Heavens!" Nigel muttered under his breath. "You heard about
Atcheson?"
She nodded.
"Poor fellow, they got him all right. You talk about thrills, Nigel,"
she went on. "Do you know that the last night before I left for my
vacation, I actually heard that fat old Essendorf chuckling with his
wife about how his clever police had laid an English spy by the heels,
and telling her, also, of the papers which they had discovered and
handed over. All the time the real dispatch, written by Atcheson when
he was dying, was sewn into my corsets.
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