In my presence she openly defied Henry Banfield and cut herself adrift from him, while Charles Pierron, after his ignominious failure in Berlin, and possibly on account of certain allegations made by the rich American, who wished to get rid of him, was dismissed from the French Secret Service and disappeared, while the pretty Suzette, three months afterwards, married Armand Thomas.
I was present at the quiet wedding out at Melun in the first days of 1909, being the bearer of a costly present in the form of a pretty diamond pendant, as well as a dozen pairs of sixteen-button-length kid gloves from an anonymous donor.
She alone knew that the pendant had been sent to her as a mark of gratitude by the grave-faced old peer, the confirmed woman-hater, who was Minister for Foreign Affairs of His Majesty King Edward the Seventh.
More than once lately I have been a welcome visitor at the bright little apartment within a stone's-throw of the Étoile.
Ray and I were in Newcastle-on-Tyne a few weeks after our success in frustrating the German plot against England.
Certain observations we had kept had led us to believe that a frantic endeavour was being made to obtain certain details of a new type of gun, of enormous power and range, which at that moment was under construction at the Armstrong Works at Elswick.
The Tyne and Tees have long ago been surveyed by Germany, and no doubt the accurate and detailed information pigeon-holed in the Intelligence Bureau at Berlin would, if seen by the good people of Newcastle, cause them a _mauvais quart d'heure_, as well as considerable alarm.
Yet there are one or two secrets of the Tyne and its defences which are fortunately not yet the property of our friends the enemy.
But from our quarters at the Station Hotel in Newcastle we made many careful and confidential inquiries. We discovered, among other things, the existence of a secret German club in a back street off Grainger Street, and the members of this institution we watched narrowly.
Now no British workman will willingly give away any secret to a foreign Power, and we did not suspect that any one employed at the great Elswick Works would be guilty of treachery. In these days of socialistic, fire-brand oratory there is always, however, the danger of a discharged workman making revelations with objects of private vengeance, never realising that it is a nation's secrets that he may be betraying. Yet in the course of a fortnight's inquiry we learned nothing to lead us to suspect that our enemies would obtain the information they sought.