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‘May I ask if your Majesty’s suspicions point in any particular direction?’ I asked, trying to feel my way cautiously. ‘The President of the Boers is perhaps——’

The Kaiser interrupted me.

‘I do not think Kruger would dare to provoke me by such a trick. He would know that he would be the first to suffer when it was found out. No, I am convinced that we must look nearer home for the traitor.’

Something in the Emperor’s tone struck me as significant.

‘If you could give me any indication of the person——’ I ventured to throw out.

His Majesty looked at me fixedly as he answered—

‘Does it not occur to you, Monsieur V——, that there is in my Empire a powerful family, the heads of which seem at one time to have cherished the notion that the Hohenzollerns could not reign without them, a family which aspired to play the same part in modern Germany which was played by the Mayors of the Palace in the Empire of the Merovingians?’

‘You allude, sire, without doubt, to the Bismarcks?’

‘My grandfather was forced into war with the French by a forged telegram. There would be nothing surprising in an attempt from the same quarter to force me into a war with England.’