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"

"You are required to attend a special meeting of the Council of Seven. Time and place will be communicated to you in due course. Meanwhile you are advised to put your affairs in order."

There was no signature to this document. It revealed nothing beyond these trite sentences, so cryptic and so bald, which might mean so little or so much.

To Saul Hartz, however, this message implied a great deal. It was his boast, and no idle one, that he was the best informed man in Europe. The wonderful organization of which he was the mainspring, the controlling spirit, gave him facilities for knowing what was taking place behind the scenes, not in England nor in Europe only, but in every land of the habitable globe. Many portentous and significant things, the aftermath of the recent world upheaval, which were only hinted at in senates and chancellories or vaguely guessed at by private individuals and the public at large were matters of common form to Saul Hartz. No man alive had a deeper insight into hidden things. And for that reason the shock he now received would hardly have been felt by a person of average information or experience.

This message, strange as it was, came as a blow he had half foreseen. He was not unprepared, yet in spite of himself he felt a little stunned by it. The