and noble family, and when they came to take him from his cell in the Cherche-Midi, he was dead.  Charles, his brother, disappeared.  It was said he also had killed himself; that he had been appointed a military attache in South America; that to revenge his brother he had entered the secret service; but whatever became of him no one knew.  All that was certain was that, thanks to the act of Marie Gessler, on the rolls of the French army the ancient and noble name of Ravignac no longer appeared.

In her chosen profession Marie Gessler found nothing discreditable.  Of herself her opinion was not high, and her opinion of men was lower.  For her smiles she had watched several sacrifice honor, duty, loyalty; and she held them and their kind in contempt.  To lie, to cajole, to rob men of secrets they thought important, and of secrets the importance of which they did not even guess, was to her merely an intricate and exciting game.

She played it very well.  So well that in the service her advance was rapid.  On important missions she was sent to Russia, through the Balkans; even to the United States.  There, with credentials as an army nurse, she inspected our military hospitals and unobtrusively asked many innocent questions.

When she begged to be allowed to work in her beloved Paris, “they” told her when war came “they” intended to plant her inside that city, and that, until then, the less Paris knew of her the better.

But just before the great war broke, to report on which way Italy might jump, she was sent to Rome, and it was not until September she was recalled.  The telegram informed her that her Aunt Elizabeth was ill, and that at once she must return to Berlin.  This, she learned from the code book wrapped under the cover of her thermos bottle, meant that she was to report to the general commanding the German forces at Soissons.

From Italy she passed through Switzerland, and, after leaving Basle, on military trains was rushed north to Luxemburg, and then west to Laon.  She was accompanied by her companion, Bertha, an elderly and respectable, even distinguished-looking female.  In the secret service her number was 528.  Their passes from the war office described them as nurses of the German Red Cross.  Only the Intelligence Department knew their real mission.  With her also, as her chauffeur, was a young Italian soldier of fortune, Paul Anfossi.  He had served in the Belgian Congo, in the French Foreign Legion in Algiers, and spoke all the European languages.  In Rome, where as a wireless operator he was serving a commercial company, in selling Marie copies of messages he had memorized, Marie had found him useful, and when war came she obtained for him, from the Wilhelmstrasse, the number 292.  From Laon, in one of the automobiles of the General Staff, the three spies were driven first to Soissons, and then along the road to Meaux and Paris, to the village of Neufchelles.  They arrived at