Only one man in the world to-day could look like that.  Only one man in the world to-day could show, by the ravage in his face, the appalling weight of responsibility slowly crushing one of the most vigorous and resilient personalities in Europe.  His figure, erstwhile erect and well-knit, seemed to have shrunk, and his withered arm, unnaturally looped away into his pocket, assumed a prominence that lent something sinister to that forbidding grey and harassed face.

His head was sunk forward on his breast.  His face, always intensely sallow, almost Italian in its olive tint, was livid.  All its alertness was gone; the features seemed to have collapsed, and the flesh hung flabbily, bulging in deep pouches under the eyes and in loose folds at the corners of the mouth.  His head was grizzled an iron-grey but the hair at the temples was white as driven snow.  Only his eyes were unchanged.  They were the same grey, steely eyes, restless, shifting, unreliable, mirrors of the man’s impulsive, wayward and fickle mind.

He lowered at me.  His brow was furrowed and his eyes flashed malice.  In the brief instant in which I gazed at him I thought of a phrase a friend had used after seeing the Kaiser in one of his angry moods—­“His icy, black look.”

I was so taken aback at finding myself in the Emperor’s presence that I forgot my part and remained staring in stupefaction at the apparition.  The other was seemingly too busy with his thoughts to notice my forgetfulness, for he spoke at once, imperiously, in the harsh staccato of a command.

“What is this I hear?” he said.  “Why has not Grundt come?  What are you doing here?”

By this time I had elaborated the fable I had begun to tell in the corridor without.  I had it ready now:  it was thin, but it must suffice.

“If your Majesty will allow me, I will explain,” I said.  The Emperor was rocking himself to and fro, in nervous irritability, on his feet.  His eyes were never steady for an instant:  now they searched my face, now they fell to the floor, now they scanned the ceiling.

“Dr. Grundt and I succeeded in our quest, dangerous though it was.  As your Majesty is aware, the ... the ... the object had been divided....”

“Yes, yes, I know!  Go on!” the other said, pausing for a moment in his rocking.

“I was to have left England first with my portion.  I could not get away.  Everyone is searched for letters and papers at Tilbury.  I devised a scheme and we tested it, but it failed.”

“How?  It failed?” the other cried.

“With no detriment to the success of our mission, Your Majesty.”

“Explain!  What was your stratagem?”

“I cut a piece of the lining from a handbag and in this I wrapped a perfectly harmless letter addressed to an English shipping agent in Rotterdam.  I then pasted the fragment of the lining back in its place in the bottom of the bag.  Grundt gave the bag to one of our number as an experiment to see if it would elude the vigilance of the English police.”