"That lends itself to the fact that he did meditate some sort of betrayal. I presume the information related to his political associations."
"I scarcely think so in the sense you imply. More probably something that would have helped his party. I do not know, as I have told you, the exact nature of the news, but I gathered of course that it must affect my own country, seeing that it was as an English newspaper man he approached me."
"You have taken no other part in these Polish intrigues?"
I smiled. "I am an Englishman, not a Pole; and have no other feeling in their affairs beyond the natural English attitude toward any movement which has the liberty of the subject as its motive. But this was business, you understand."
"One other question. You owed him no money?"
"Not a mark. I never have. I am now a man of considerable means indeed."
He bowed and lifted his hands to signify that he had finished with me. "I can go?" I asked.
"And Fräulein Ziegler? She is in need of a friend and I should like to help her if she wishes? It is the more terrible for her as she was to have been married to-morrow."
I regretted my indiscretion, but it was too late. "To Herr Hugo von Felsen."
"Ah. That explains. She asked to see him."
"Can I see her?" I asked, and received a ready assent.
I went to her with the mere intention of offering assistance, the last thing in my thoughts being that a momentous discovery was to be the result of the interview.
It will be readily understood that at the moment of my leaving the police official to go to Hagar Ziegler I was in a very unusual mood. Within the past twenty-four hours I had been within an ace of losing my life; I had seriously wounded if not actually killed a fellow-creature in order to escape; I had endured the bitter mortification of police detention; and had returned to Berlin to take up the thread of an exciting struggle. And now on the top of all had come the murder of the Jew, with its consequences of personal hazard to myself and its disastrous menace to my plans. The examination by the police had, moreover, been a great strain, and when I rose from it I felt both nervous and unstrung.
I say this in order to account in some measure for an act which was altogether foreign to my customary habit, and a paltering and cowardly hesitation which I have never been quite able to understand.