She smiled thoughtfully.

"Do you know exactly where I have been?" she asked.

"No idea," he confessed. "What my uncle has just told me was a complete
revelation, so far as I was concerned. I believed, with the rest of the
world, what the newspapers announced--that you were visiting Japan and
China, and afterwards the South Sea Islands, with the Wendercombes."

She smiled.

"Dad wanted to tell you," she said, "but it was I who made him promise
not to. I was afraid you would be disagreeable about it. We arranged it
all with the Wendercombes, but as a matter of fact I did not even start
with them. For the last eight months, I have been living part of the
time in Berlin and part of the time in a country house near the Black
Forest."

"Alone?"

"Not a bit of it! I have been governess to the two daughters of Herr
Essendorf."

"Essendorf, the President of the German Republic?"

Lady Maggie nodded.

"He isn't a bit like his pictures. He is a huge fat man and he eats a
great deal too much. Oh, the horror of those meals!" she added, with a