he Parisians.

I had serious business with Suzette Darbour.

After our success in preventing the plans of the improved _Dreadnoughts_
falling into German hands, I had, at Ray's suggestion, left Charing
Cross in search of the dainty little divinity before me, the
neat-waisted girl with the big dark eyes, the tiny mouth, and the cheeks
that still bore the bloom of youth upon them--the girl who, at the Hotel
d'Angleterre, in Copenhagen, had been known as Vera Yermoloff, of Riga,
and who had afterwards lived in the gay little watering-place of Caux
under the same name, and had so entirely deceived me--the girl whom I
now knew to be the catspaw of others--in a word, a decoy!

Yet how sweet, how modest her manner, how demure she looked as she sat
there before me at the little table beneath the trees, sipping her tea
and lifting her smiling eyes to mine. Even though I had told her plainly
that I was aware of the truth, she remained quite unconcerned. She had
no fear of me apparently. For her, exposure and the police had no
terrors. She seemed rather amused than otherwise.

I lit a cigarette, and by so doing obtained time for reflection.

My search had led me first to the Midi, thence into Italy, across to
Sebenico in Dalmatia, to Venice, and back to Paris, where only that
morning, with the assistance of my old friend of my student days in the
French capital, Gaston Bernard, of the Prefecture of Police, I had
succeeded in running her to earth. I had only that morning found her
residing with a girl friend--a seamstress at Duclerc's--in a tiny flat
_au cinquieme_ in a frowsy old house at the top of the Rue Pigalle, and
living in her own name, that of Suzette Darbour.

And as I sat smoking I wondered if I dared request her assistance.

In the course of my efforts to combat the work of German spies in
England I had been forced to make many queer friendships, but none
perhaps so strange as the one I was now cultivating. Suzette Darbour
was, I had learned from Ray Raymond a few months ago, a decoy in
association with a very prince of swindlers, an American who made his
head-quarters in Paris, and who had in the past year or two effected
amazing _coups_, financial and otherwise, in the various capitals of
Europe.

Her age was perhaps twenty-two, though certainly she did not look more
than eighteen. She spoke both English and Russian quite well, for, as
she had told me long ago, she had spent her early days in Petersburg.
And