Her breakfast was standing untouched on the table beside her bed.  She regarded it distastefully.  Then, recalling with a wry smile Baroni’s dictum that “good food, and plenty of good food, means voice,” she reluctantly began to eat, idly turning over the while the pages of one of the newspapers which Milling had placed beside the breakfast tray.  It was an illustrated weekly, and numbered amongst its staff an enterprising young journalist, possessed of an absolute genius for nosing out such matters as the principal people concerned in them particularly desired kept secret.  Those the enterprising young journalist’s paper served up piping-hot in their Tattle of the Town column—­a column denounced by the pilloried few and devoured with eager interest by the rest of the world.

Diana, sipping her coffee, turned to it half-heartedly, hoping to find some odd bit of news that might serve to distract her thoughts.

There were the usual sly hits at several well-known society women whose public charities covered a multitude of private sins, followed by a very inadequately veiled reference to the chief actors in a recent divorce case, and then—­

Diana’s eyes glued themselves to the printed page before her.  Very deliberately she set down her cup on the tray beside her, and taking up the paper again, re-read the paragraph which had so suddenly riveted her attention.  It ran as follows:—­

“Is it true that the nom de plume of a dramatist, well-known in London circles, masks the identity of the son of a certain romantic royal duke who contracted a morganatic marriage with one of the most beautiful Englishwomen of the seventies?

“It would be curious if there proved to be a connecting link between this whisper and the recent disappearance from the stage of the popular actress who has been so closely associated with the plays emanating from the gifted pen of that same dramatist.

“Interested readers should carefully watch forthcoming events in the little state of Ruvania.”

Diana stared at the newspaper incredulously, and a half-stifled exclamation broke from her.

There was—­there could be—­no possible doubt to whom the paragraph bore reference. “A well-known dramatist and the popular actress so closely associated with his works”—­why, to any one with the most superficial knowledge of plays and players of the moment, it was as obvious as though the names had been written in capitals.

Max and Adrienne!  Their identities linked together and woven into a fresh tissue of mystery and innuendo!

Diana smiled a little at the suggestion that Max might be the son of a royal duke.  It was so very far-fetched—­fantastic in the extreme.

And then, all at once, she remembered Olga’s significant query of long ago:  “Have you ever asked him who he is?” and Max’s stern refusal to answer the question when she had put it to him.