“There is no news,” Naida declared, as the butler announced the service of the meal.  “We have reached the far end of the ways.  The next disclosures, if ever they are made, will come from others.  At luncheon we are going to talk of the English country, the seaside, the meadows, and the quiet places.  The time arrives when I weary, weary, of the brazen ticking of the clock of fate.”

“I shall tell you,” Nigel declared, “of a small country house I have in Devonshire.  There are rough grounds stretching down to the sea and crawling up to the moors behind.  My grandfather built it when he was Chancellor of England, or rather he added to an old farmhouse.  He called it the House of Peace.”

“My father built a house very much in the same spirit,” Naida told them.  “He called it after an old Turkish inscription, engraven on the front of a villa in Stamboul—­’The House of Thought and Flowers.’”

Maggie smiled across the table approvingly.

“I like the conversation,” she said.  “Naida and I are, after all, women and sentimentalists.  We claim a respite, an armistice—­call it what you will.  Prince Karschoff, won’t you tell me of the most beautiful house you ever dwelt in?”

“Always the house I am hoping to end my days in,” he answered.  “But let me tell you about a villa I had in Cannes, fifteen years ago.  People used to speak of it as one of the world’s treasures.”

When the two men were seated alone over their coffee, Nigel passed Chalmers’ note and the enclosure across to his companion.

“You remember I told you about Chalmers’ friend, Jesson, the secret service man who came over to us?” he said.  “Chalmers has just sent me round this.”

Karschoff nodded and studied the message through his great horn-rimmed eyeglass.

“I thought that he was going to Russia for you,” he said.

“So he did.  He must have gone on from there.”

“And the message comes from Southern China,” Prince Karschoff reflected.

Nigel was deep in thought.  China, Russia, Germany!  Prince Shan in England, negotiating with Immelan!  And behind, sinister, menacing, mysterious—­Japan!

“Supposing,” he propounded at last, “there really does exist a secret treaty between China and Japan?”

“If there is,” Prince Karschoff observed, “one can easily understand what Immelan has been at.  Prince Shan can command the whole of Asia.  I know they are afraid of something of the sort in the States.  An American who was in the club yesterday told us they had spent over a hundred millions on their west coast fortifications in the last two years.”

“One can understand, too, in that case,” Nigel continued, “why Japan left the League of Nations.  That stunt of hers about being outside the sphere of possible misunderstandings never sounded honest.”

“It was unfortunate,” Prince Karschoff said, “that America was dominated for those few months by an honest but impractical idealist.  He had the germ of an idea, but he thrust it on the world before even his own country was ready for it.  In time the nations would certainly have elaborated something more workable.”