wo or three rapid turns up and down the room, chewing and
puffing at his cigar, until he stopped before Phadrig, and said quietly,
but with angry eyes:

"Very well, we will grant that I am watched by the International. Tell
me how you came to know it."

The Egyptian took a few sips of his coffee, and then related almost word
for word his interview with Josephus. He ended by saying:

"Your Highness may believe or not now as you please, but I presume you
will when you read in your paper to-morrow morning of the suicide of a
respectable Hebrew merchant named Isaac Josephus at the address which I
have mentioned."

Oscarovitch had pretty strong nerves, and he was well accustomed to
regard any kind of crime as a quite proper means of furthering
political ends: but there was something in this man's utter
soullessness and the weird horror of the crime which he had just
accomplished--for by this time his victim would be already lying
self-slain on the floor of his own spider's lair--that chilled him,
cold-blooded as he was. He looked at him lounging in his chair and
calmly puffing the smoke from his half-smiling lips as though he hadn't
a thought beyond the little blue rings that he was making.

"That was a devilish thing to do, Phadrig!" he said, a little above a
whisper.

"Devilish, possibly, Highness, but necessary, of a certainty," was the
quiet reply. "You will agree with me that Nicol Hendry is a dangerous
antagonist even for you, and as for me--no doubt he thinks that he can
crush me under his foot whenever he chooses to put it down. I should
like to know his feelings as he reads of his spy's suicide when he had
only just got to work."

"It will certainly be somewhat of a shock to him and his colleagues, and
for that reason I am inclined, on second thoughts, to agree that it was
necessary, and ghastly, as I confess; it seems to me, I think, that you
took the best means to give them a salutary warning. After all, the life
of an individual, and that individual a Jew, does not count for much
when the fate of empires is at stake. What puzzles me is how these
fellows came to suspect me, and what do they suspect me of. I suppose
you have no idea on the subject, have you?"

He looked at him keenly as he spoke, but he might as well have looked at
the face of a graven image. Then, like a flash of inspiration, the
Zastrow affair leapt into his mind. Had his connection with that, by any
extraordinary chance, come to the kn