The two men who had walked up together arm in arm from Downing Street, stood for several moments in Pall Mall before separating. The pressman who was passing yearned for the sunlight in his camera. One of the greatest financiers of the city in close confabulation with Mr. Gordon Jones, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was an interesting, almost an historical sight.
“It is a source of the greatest satisfaction to me, Sir Alfred,” the Minister was saying earnestly, “to find such royal and whole-hearted support in the city. I am afraid,” he went on, with a little twinkle in his eyes, “that there are times when I have scarcely been popular in financial circles.”
“We have hated you like poison,” the other assured him, with emphasis.
“The capitalists must always hate the man who tries to make wealth pay its just share in the support of the Empire,” Mr. Gordon Jones remarked. “The more one has, the less one likes to part with it. However, those days have passed. You bankers have made my task easier at every turn. You have met me in every possible way. To you personally, Sir Alfred, I feel that some day I shall have to express my thanks—my thanks and the thanks of the nation—in a more tangible form.”
“You are very kind,” the banker acknowledged. “Times like this change everything. We remember only that we are Englishmen.”
The Minister hailed a passing taxi and disappeared. The banker strolled slowly along Pall Mall and passed through the portals of an august-looking club. The hall-porter relieved him of his coat and hat with great deference. As he was crossing the hall, after having exchanged greetings with several friends, he came face to face with Surgeon-Major Thomson. The latter paused.
“I am afraid you don’t remember me, Sir Alfred,” he said, “but I have been hoping for an opportunity of thanking you personally for the six ambulance cars you have endowed. I am Surgeon-Major Thomson, chief inspector of Field Hospitals.”
Sir Alfred held out his hand affably.
“I remember you perfectly, Major,” he declared. “I am very glad that my gift is acceptable. Anything one can do to lessen the suffering of those who are fighting our battle, is almost a charge upon our means.”
“It is very fortunate for us that you feel like that,” the other replied. “Thank you once more, sir.”
The two men separated. Sir Alfred turned to the hall-porter.
“I am expecting my nephew in to dine,” he said,—“Captain Granet. Bring him into the smoking-room, will you, directly he arrives.”
“Certainly, sir!”
Sir Alfred passed on across the marble hall. Thomson, whose hand had been upon his hat, replaced it upon the peg. He looked after the great banker and stood for a moment deep in thought. Then he addressed the hall-porter.
“By-the-bye, Charles,” he inquired, “if you ask a non-member to dinner, you have to dine in the strangers’ room, I suppose?”
“Certainly, sir,” the man replied. “It is just at the back of the general dining-room.”
“I suppose an ordinary member couldn’t dine in there alone?”
“It is not customary, sir.”
Surgeon-Major Thomson made his way to the telephone booth. When he emerged, he interviewed the head-waiter.
“Keep a small table for me in the strangers’ room,” he ordered. “I shall require dinner for two.”
“At what time, sir?”
Major Thomson seemed for a moment deaf. He was looking through the open door of the smoking-room to where Sir Alfred was deep in the pages of a review.
“Are there many people dining there to-night?” he asked.
“Sir Alfred has a guest at eight o’clock, sir,” the man replied. “There are several others, I think, but they have not ordered tables specially.”
“At a quarter past eight, if you please. I shall be in the billiard-room, Charles,” he added, turning to the hall-porter.
Sir Alfred wearied soon of the pages of his review and leaned back in his chair, his hands folded in front of him, gazing through the window at the opposite side of the way. A good many people, passing backwards and forwards, glanced at him curiously. For thirty years his had been something like a household name in the city. He had been responsible, he and the great firm of which he was the head, for international finance conducted on the soundest principles, finance which scorned speculation, finance which rolled before it the great snowball of automatically accumulated wealth. His father had been given the baronetcy which he now enjoyed, and which, as he knew very well, might at any moment be transferred into a peerage. He was a short, rather thick-set man, with firm jaws and keen blue eyes, carefully dressed in somewhat old-fashioned style, with horn-rimmed eyeglass hung about his neck with a black ribbon. His hair was a little close-cropped and stubbly. No one could have called him handsome, no one could have found him undistinguished. Even without the knowledge of his millions, people who glanced at him recognised the atmosphere of power.
“Wonder what old Anselman’s thinking about,” one man asked another in an opposite corner.
“Money bags,” was the prompt reply. “The man thinks money, he dreams money, he lives money. He lives like a prince but he has no pleasures. From ten in the morning till two, he sites in his office in Lombard Street, and the pulse of the city beats differently in his absence.”
“I wonder!” the other murmured.
Other people had wondered, too. Still the keen blue eyes looked across through the misty atmosphere at the grey building opposite. Men and women passed before him in a constant, unseen procession. No one came and spoke to him, no one interfered with his meditations. The two men who had been discussing him passed out of the room presently one of them glanced backwards in his direction.
“After all, I suppose,” he observed, as he passed down the hall, “there is something great about wealth or else one wouldn’t believe that old Anselman there was thinking of his money-bags. Why, here’s Granet. Good fellow! I’d no idea you’d joined this august company of old fogies.”
Granet smiled as he shook hands.
“I haven’t,” he explained. “You have to be a millionaire, don’t you, and a great political bug, before they’d let you in? No place for poor soldiers! I have to be content with the Rag.”
“Poor devil!” his friend remarked sympathetically,—“best cooking, best wines in London. These Service men look after themselves all right. What are you doing here, anyhow, Granet?”
“I’m dining with my uncle,” Granet replied, quickly.
“Sir Alfred’s in there, waiting for you,” his friend told him, indicating the door,—“he has been sitting at the window watching for you, in fact. So long!”
The two men passed out and Granet was ushered into the smoking-room. Sir Alfred came back from his reverie and was greeted by his nephew cordially. The two men sat by the window for a few moments in silence.
“An aperitif?” Sir Alfred suggested. “Capital!”
They drank mixed vermouth. Sir Alfred picked up an evening paper from his side.
“Any news?” he asked.
“Nothing fresh,” Granet replied. “The whole worlds excited about this submarine affair. Looks as though we’d got the measure of those Johnnies, doesn’t it?”
“It does indeed,” Sir Alfred agreed. “Two submarines, one after the other, two of the latest class, too, destroyed within a few miles and without a word of explanation. No wonder every one’s excited about it!”
“They’re fearfully bucked at the Admiralty, I believe,” Granet remarked. “Of course, they’ll pretend that they had this new dodge or whatever it may be, up their sleeves all the time.”
Sir Alfred nodded.
“Well,” he said, “come in to dinner, young fellow. You shall entertain me with tales of your adventures whilst you compare our cuisine here with your own commissariat.”
They passed on into the strangers’ dining-room, a small but cheerful apartment opening out of the general dining-room. The head-waiter ushered them unctuously to a small table set in the far corner of the room.
“I have obeyed your wishes, Sir Alfred,” he announced, as they seated themselves. “No one else will be dining anywhere near you.”
Sir Alfred nodded.
“Knowing how modest you soldiers are in talking of your exploits,” he remarked to Granet, “I have pleaded for seclusion. Here, in the intervals of our being served with dinner, you can spin me yarns of the Front. The whole thing fascinates me. I want to hear the story of your escape.”
They seated themselves, and Sir Alfred studied the menu for a moment through his eyeglass. After the service of the soup they were alone. He leaned a little across the table.
“Ronnie,” he said, “I thought it was better to ask you here than to have you down at the city.”
Granet nodded.
“This seems all right,” he admitted, glancing around. “Well, one part of the great work is finished. I have lived for eleven days not quite sure when I wasn’t going to be stood up with my back to the light at the Tower. Now it’s over.”
“You’ve seen Pailleton?”
“Seen him, impressed him, given him the document. He has his plans all made.”
“Good! Very good!”
Sir Alfred ate soup for several moments as though it were the best soup on earth and nothing else was worth consideration. Then he laid down his spoon.
“Magnificent!” he said. “Now listen—these submarines. There was a Taube close at hand and I can tell you something which the Admiralty here are keeping dark, with their tongues in their cheeks. Both those submarines were sunk under water.”
“I guessed it,” Granet replied coolly. “I not only guessed it but I came very near the key of the whole thing.”
A waiter appeared with the next course, followed by the wine steward, carrying champagne. Sir Alfred nodded approvingly.
“Just four minutes in the ice,” he instructed, “not longer. What you tell me about the champagne country is, I must confess, a relief,” he added, turning to Granet. “It may not affect us quite so much, but personally I believe that the whole world is happier and better when champagne is cheap. It is the bottled gaiety of the nation. A nation of ginger ale drinkers would be doomed before they reached the second generation. 1900 Pommery, this, Ronnie, and I drink your health. If I may be allowed one moment’s sentiment,” he added, raising his glass, “let me say that I drink your health from the bottom of my hear, with all the admiration which a man of my age feels for you younger fellows who are fighting for us and our country.”
They drank the toast in silence. In a moment or two they were alone again.
“Go on, Ronnie,” his uncle said. “I am interested.”
“I met Conyers the other day,” Granet proceeded, “the man who commands theScorpion.I managed to get an invitation down to Portsmouth to have lunch with him on his ship. I went down with his sister and the young lady he is engaged to marry. On deck there was a structure of some sort covered up. I tried to make inquires about it but they headed me off pretty quick. There was even a sentry standing on guard before it—wouldn’t let me even feel the shape of it. However, I hadn’t given up hope when there came a wireless—no guests to be allowed on board. Conyers had to pack us all off back to the hotel, without stopping even for lunch. From the hotel I got a telescope and I saw a pinnace with half-a-dozen workmen, and a pilot who was evidently an engineer, land on board. They seemed to be completing the adjustments of some new piece of mechanism. Then they steamed away out of sight of the land.”
“A busy life, yours, Ronnie,” Sir Alfred remarked, after a moments pause. “What about it now? I’ve had two urgent messages from Berlin this morning.”
“It’s pretty difficult,” Granet acknowledged. “TheScorpion’sout in the Channel or the North Sea. No getting at her. And I don’t believe there’s another destroyer yet fitted with this apparatus, whatever it may be.”
“They must be making them somewhere, though,” Sir Alfred remarked.
His nephew nodded.
“To think,” he muttered, “that we’ve two hundred men spread out at Tyneside, Woolwich and Portsmouth, and not one of them got on to this! A nation of spies, indeed! They’re mugs, uncle.”
“Not altogether that,” the banker replied. “We have some reports, although they don’t go far enough. I can put you on to the track of the thing. The apparatus you saw is something in the nature of an inverted telescope, with various extraordinary lenses treated by a new process. You can see forty feet down under the surface of the water for a distance of a mile, and we believe that attached to the same apparatus is an instrument which brings any moving object within the range of what they call a deep-water gun.”
“Did that come from reports?” Granet asked eagerly.
“It did,” Sir Alfred said. “Further than that, the main part of the instrument is being made under the supervision of Sir Meyville Worth, in a large workshop erected on his estate in a village near Brancaster in Norfolk.”
“I take it back,” Granet remarked.
“The plans of the instrument should be worth a hundred thousand pounds,” Sir Alfred continued calmly. “If that is impossible, the destruction of the little plant would be the next consideration.”
“Do I come in here?” Granet inquired.
“You do, Ronnie,” his uncle replied. “The name of the village where Sir Meyville Worth lives is Market Burnham, which, as I think I told you, is within a few miles of Brancaster. Geoffrey, at my instigation, has arranged a harmless little golf party to go to Brancaster the day after to-morrow. You will accompany them. In the meantime, Miss Worth, Sir Meyville Worth’s only daughter, is staying in London until Wednesday. She is lunching with your aunt at the Ritz to-morrow. I have made some other arrangements in connection with your visit to Norfolk, which will keep for the present. I see that some strangers have entered the room. Tell me exactly how you came by the wound in your foot?”
Granet turned a little around. There was a queer change in his face as he looked back at his uncle.
“Do you know the man at that corner table?” he asked.
Sir Alfred glanced across the room.
“Very slightly. I spoke to him an hour ago. He thanked me for some ambulances. He is the chief inspector of hospitals, I think—Major Thomson, his name is.”
“Did you happen to say that I was dining with you?”
Sir Alfred reflected for a moment.
“I believe that I did mention it,” he admitted. “Why?”
Granet struggled for a moment with an idea and rejected it. He drained his glass and leaned across the table.
“He’s a dull enough person really,” he remarked, a little under his breath, “but I seem to be always running up against him. Once or twice he’s given me rather a start.”
Sir Alfred smiled. He called the wine steward and pointed to his nephew’s glass.
“The best thing in the world,” he observed drily, as he watched the wine being poured out, “for presentiments.”
Lady Anselman stood once more in the foyer of the Ritz Hotel and counted her guests. It was a smaller party this time, and in its way a less distinguished one. There were a couple of officers, friends of Granet’s, back from the Front on leave; Lady Conyers, with Geraldine and Olive; Granet himself; and a tall, dark girl with pallid complexion and brilliant eyes, who had come with Lady Anselman and who was standing now by her side.
“I suppose you know everybody, my dear?” Lady Anselman asked her genially.
The girl shook her head a little disconsolately.
“We are so little in London, Lady Anselman,” she murmured. “You know how difficult father is, and just now he is worse than ever. In fact, if he weren’t so hard at work I don’t believe he’d have let me come even now.”
“These scientific men,” Lady Anselman declared, “are great boons to the country, but as parent I am afraid they are just a little thoughtless. Major Harrison and Colonel Grey, let me present you to my young charge—for the day only, unfortunately—Miss Worth. Now, Ronnie, if you can be persuaded to let Miss Conyers have a moment’s peace perhaps you will show us the way in to lunch.”
Granet promptly abandoned his whispered conversation with Geraldine. The little company moved in and took their places at the round table which was usually reserved for Lady Anselman on Tuesdays.
“Some people,” the latter remarked, as she seated herself, “find fault with me for going on with my luncheons this season. Even Alfred won’t come except now and then. Personally, I have very strong views about it. I think we all ought to keep on doing just the same as usual—to a certain extent, of course. There is no reason why we should bring the hotel proprietors and shopkeepers to the brink of ruin because we are all feeling more or less miserable.”
“Quite right,” her neighbour, Colonel Grey, assented. “I am sure it wouldn’t do us any good out there to feel that you were all sitting in sackcloth and ashes. Besides, think how pleasant this is to come home to,” he added, looking around the little table. “Jove! What a good-looking girl Miss Conyers is!”
Lady Anselman nodded and lowered her voice a little.
“She has just broken her engagement to Surgeon-Major Thomson. I wonder whether you know him?”
“Inspector of Field Hospitals or something, isn’t he?” the other remarked carelessly. “I came across him once at Boulogne. Rather a dull sort of fellow he seemed.”
Lady Anselman sighed.
“I am afraid Geraldine found him so,” she agreed. “Her mother is very disappointed. I can’t help thinking myself, though, that a girl with her appearance ought to do better.”
The Colonel reflected for a moment.
“Seems to me I’ve heard something about Thomson somewhere,” he said, half to himself. “By-the-bye, who is the pale girl with the wonderful eyes, to whom your nephew is making himself so agreeable?”
“That is Isabel Worth,” Lady Anselman replied. “She is the daughter of Sir Meyville Worth, the great scientist. I am afraid she has rather a dull time, poor girl. Her father lives in an out-of-the-way village of Norfolk, spends all his time trying to discover things, and forgets that he has a daughter at all. She has been in London for a few days with an aunt, but I don’t believe that the old lady is able to do much for her.”
“Ronnie seems to be making the running all right,” her neighbour observed.
“I asked him specially to look after her,” Lady Anselman confided, “and Ronnie is always such a dear at doing what he is told.”
Major Harrison leaned across the table towards them.
“Didn’t I hear you mention Thomson’s name just now?” he inquired. “I saw him the other day in Boulogne. Awful swell he was about something, too. A destroyer brought him across, and a Government motor-car was waiting at the quay to rush him up to the Front. We all thought at Boulogne that royalty was coming, at least.”
There was a slight frown on Granet’s forehead. He glanced half unconsciously towards Geraldine.
“Mysterious sort of fellow, Thomson,” Major Harrison continued, in blissful ignorance of the peculiar significance of his words. “You see him in Paris one day, you hear of him at the furthermost point of the French lines immediately afterwards, he reports at headquarters within a few hours, and you meet him slipping out of a back door of the War Office, a day or two later.”
“Inspector of Field Hospitals is a post which I think must have been created for him,” Colonel Grey remarked. “He’s an impenetrable sort of chap.”
“Was Major Thomson going or returning from France when you saw him last?” Geraldine asked, looking across the table.
“Coming back. When we left Boulogne, the destroyer which brought him over was waiting in the harbour. It passed us in mid-Channel, doing about thirty knots to our eighteen. Prince Cyril was rather sick. He was bringing dispatches but no one seemed to have thought of providing a destroyer for him.”
“After all,” Lady Anselman murmured, “there is nothing very much more important than our hospitals.”
The conversation drifted away from Thomson. Granet was making himself very agreeable indeed to Isabel Worth. There was a little more colour in her cheeks than at the commencement of luncheon, and her manner had become more animated.
“Tell me about the village where you live?” he inquired—“Market Burnham, isn’t it?”
“When we first went there,” she replied, “I thought that it was simply Paradise. That was four years ago, though, and I scarcely counted upon spending the winters there.”
“You find it lovely, then.”
She shivered a little, half closing her eyes as though to shut out some unpleasant memory.
“The house,” she explained, “is on a sort of tongue of land, with a tidal river on either side and the sea not fifty yards away from our drawing-room window. When there are high tides, we are simply cut off from the mainland altogether unless we go across on a farm cart.”
“You mustn’t draw too gloomy a picture of your home,” Lady Anselman said. “I have seen it when it was simply heavenly.”
“And I have seen it,” the girl retorted, with a note of grimness in her tone, “when it was a great deal more like the other place—stillness that seems almost to stifle you, grey mists that choke your breath and blot out everything; nothing but the gurgling of a little water, and the sighing—the most melancholy sighing you ever heard—of the wind in our ragged elms. I am talking about the autumn and winter now, you must remember.”
“It doesn’t sound attractive,” Granet admitted. “By-the-bye, which side of Norfolk are you? You are nowhere near Brancaster, I suppose?”
“We are within four miles of it,” the girl replied quickly. “You don’t ever come there, do you?”
Granet looked at her with uplifted eyebrows.
“This is really rather a coincidence!” he exclaimed. “I’ve never been to Brancaster in my life but I’ve promised one or two fellows to go down to the Dormy House there, to-morrow or the next day, and have a week’s golf. Geoff Anselman is going, for one.”
The girl was for a moment almost good-looking. Her eyes glowed, her tone was eloquently appealing.
“You’ll come by and see us, won’t you?” she begged.
“If I may, I’d be delighted,” Granet promised heartily. “When are you going back?”
“To-morrow. You’re quite sure that you’ll come?”
“I shall come all right,” Granet assured her. “I’m not so keen on golf as some of the fellows, and my arm’s still a little dicky, but I’m fed up with London, and I’m not allowed even to come before the Board again for a fortnight, so I rather welcome the chance of getting right away. The links are good, I suppose?”
“Wonderful,” Miss Worth agreed eagerly, “and I think the club-house is very comfortable. There are often some quite nice men staying there. If only father weren’t so awfully peculiar, the place would be almost tolerable in the season. That reminds me,” she went on, with a little sigh, “I must warn you about father. He’s the most unsociable person that ever lived.”
“I’m not shy,” Granet laughed. “By-the-bye, pardon me, but isn’t your father the Sir Meyville Worth who invents things? I’m not quite sure what sort of things,” he added. “Perhaps you’d better post me up before I come?”
“I sha’n’t tell you a thing.” Isabel Worth declared. “Just now it’s very much better for you to know nothing whatever about him. He has what I call the inventors’ fidgets, for some reason or other. If a strange person comes near the place he simply loses his head.”
“Perhaps I sha’n’t be welcome, then?” Granet remarked disconsolately.
There was a flash in the girl’s eyes as she answered him.
“I can assure you that you will, Captain Granet,” she said. “If father chooses to behave like a bear, well, I’ll try and make up for him.”
She glanced at him impressively and Granet bowed. A few minutes later in obedience to Lady Anselman’s signal, they all made their way into the lounge, where coffee was being served. Granet made his way to Geraldine’s side but she received him a little coldly.
“I have been doing my aunt’s behests,” he explained. “My strict orders were to make myself agreeable to a young woman who lives in a sort of bluebeard’s house, where no visitors are allowed and smiling is prohibited.”
Geraldine looked across at Isabel Worth.
“I never met Miss Worth before,” she said. “I believe her father is wonderfully clever. Did I hear you say that you were going out of town?”
Granet nodded.
“I am going away for a few days. I am going away,” he added, dropping his voice, “ostensibly for a change of air. I have another reason for going.”
He looked at her steadfastly and she forgot her vague misgivings of a few minutes ago. After all, his perceptions were right. It was better for him to leave London for a time.
“I hope the change will do you good,” she said quietly. “I think, perhaps, you are right to go.”
Granet, a few days later, brought his car to a standstill in front of an ordinary five-barred gate upon which was painted in white letters “Market Burnham Hall.” A slight grey mist was falling and the country inland was almost blotted from sight. On the other side of the gate a sandy driver disappeared into an avenue of ragged and stunted elm trees, which effectually concealed any view of the house.
“Seems as though the girl were right,” Granet muttered to himself. “However, here goes.”
He backed his car close to the side of the hedge, and laying his hand upon the latch of the gate, prepared to swing it open. Almost immediately a figure stepped out from the shrubs.
“Halt!”
Granet looked with surprise at the khaki-clad figure.
“Your name and destination?” the man demanded.
“Captain Granet of the Royal Fusiliers, home from the Front on leave,” Granet replied. “I was going up to the Hall to call on Miss Worth.”
“Stay where you are, if you please, sir,” the man replied.
He stepped back into the sentry box and spoke through a telephone. In a moment or two he reappeared.
“Pass on, please, sir,” he said.
Granet walked slowly up the avenue, his hands behind him, a frown upon his forehead. Perhaps, after all, things were not to be so easy for him. On either side he could see the stretches of sand, and here and there the long creeks of salt water. As he came nearer to the house, the smell of the sea grew stronger, the tops of the trees were more bowed than ever, sand was blown everywhere across the hopeless flower-beds. The house itself, suddenly revealed, was a grim weather-beaten structure, built on the very edge of a queer, barrow-like tongue of land which ended with the house itself. The sea was breaking on the few yards of beach sheer below the windows. To his right was a walled garden, some lawns and greenhouses; to the left, stables, a garage, and two or three labourer’s cottages. At the front door another soldier was stationed doing sentry duty. He stood on one side, however, and allowed Granet to ring the bell.
“Officers quartered here?” Granet inquired.
“Only one, sir,” the man replied.
The door was opened almost immediately by a woman-servant. She did not wait for Granet to announce himself but motioned him to follow her into a large, circular, stone hall, across which she led him quickly and threw open the door of the drawing-room. Isabel Worth was standing just inside the room, as though listening. She held out her hand and there was no doubt about her welcome.
“Captain Granet,” she said almost in a whisper, “of course you’ll think we are all mad, but would you mind coming upstairs into my little sitting-room?”
“Of course not,” Granet acquiesced. “I’ll come anywhere, with pleasure. What a view you have from here!”
He glanced through the high windows at the other end of the room. She laid her fingers upon his arm and led him towards the door.
“Quietly, please,” she whispered. “Try and imagine that you are in a house of conspirators.”
She led him up the quaint stone staircase, spiral-shaped, to the first floor. Arrived there, she paused to listen for a moment, then breathed a little more freely and led him to a small sitting-room at the end of a long passage. It was a pleasant little apartment and looked sheer out over the sea. She threw herself down upon a sofa with a sigh of relief, and pointed to a chair.
“Do sit down, Captain Granet,” she begged. “I am really not in the least insane but father is. You know, I got back on Wednesday night and was met at once with stern orders that no visitors of any sort were to be received, that the tradespeople were to be interviewed at the front gates—in fact that the house was to be in a state of siege.”
Granet appeared puzzled.
“But why?”
“Simply because dad has gone out of his senses,” she replied wearily. “Look here.”
She led him cautiously to the window and pointed downwards. About fifty yards out at sea was a queer wooden structure, set up on strong supports. From where they were, nothing was to be seen but a windowless wall of framework and a rope ladder. Underneath, a boat was tethered to one of the supports. About thirty yards away, a man was rowing leisurely around in another small boat.
“That’s where father spends about twelve hours a day,” she said. “What he is doing no one knows. He won’t even allow me to speak of it. When we meet at meals, I am not supposed to allude to the fact that he has been out in that crazy place. If ever he happens to speak of it, he calls it his workshop.”
“But he is not alone there?” Granet asked.
“Oh, no! There are two or three men from London, and an American, working with him. Then do you see the corner of the garden there?”
She pointed to a long barn or boathouse almost upon the beach. Before the door two sentries were standing. Even from where they sat they could hear the faint whirr of a dynamo.
“There are twenty men at work in there,” she said. “They all sleep in the barn or the potting sheds. They are not allowed even to go down to the village. Now, perhaps, you can begin to understand, Captain Granet, what it is like to be here.”
“Well, it all sounds very interesting,” he remarked, “but I should think it must be deadly for you. Your father invents no end of wonderful things, doesn’t he?”
“If he does, he never speaks about it,” the girl answered a little bitterly. “All that he wants from me is my absence or my silence. When I came back the other night, he was furious. If he’d thought about it, I’m sure he’d have had me stay in London. Now that I am here, though, I am simply a prisoner.”
Granet resumed his seat and lit the cigarette which she insisted upon his smoking.
“Well,” he observed, “it does seem hard upon you, Miss Worth. On the other hand, it really is rather interesting, isn’t it, to think that your father is such a man of mysteries?”
The girl sighed.
“I suppose so,” she admitted, “but then, you see, father is almost brutal about taking any one into his confidence. He never tells even me a thing, or encourages me to ask a question. I think for that reason I have grown rather to resent his work and the ridiculous restriction he places upon my freedom because of it.”
A parlourmaid entered with tea, a few minutes later, and Granet moved to his hostess’ side upon the sofa. He showed no more interest in outside happenings. He was an adept at light conversation and he made himself thoroughly agreeable for the next hour. Then he rose quickly to his feet.
“I must go,” he declared.
She sighed.
“It has been so nice to have you here,” she said, “but if you only knew how difficult it was to arrange, it, you’d understand why I hesitate to ask you to come again.”
“Why shouldn’t you come and lunch with me to-morrow at the Golf Club?” he asked.
She hesitated. It was obvious that the suggestion appealed to her.
“I believe I could,” she assented. “Captain Chalmers has a small motor-car he’d lend me, and if I go out with my golf clubs it would be all right. Very likely father will sleep out there and we sha’n’t see anything of him until to-morrow.”
Granet stepped once more to the window. The mists had rolled up more thickly than ever and the queer little structure was almost invisible. A bright light, however, fell upon the water a little distance away.
“Your father has electric light out there,” he remarked.
“Yes, they have a wire from the shed,” she told him. “Whatever he’s trying to do, he needs a very intense and concentrated light at times.”
Granet drew a little sigh.
“Well, I hope it’s something that’ll do us a bit of good,” he said. “We need it. The Germans are miles ahead of us with regard to all new-fangled ideas.”
She opened her lips and closed them again. Granet, who had suddenly stiffened into rigid attention, felt a quick impulse of disappointment.
“I have rung the bell for my own maid,” she said. “She will show you out of the place. Don’t let any one see you, if you can help it.”
“And to-morrow?” he asked. “You will lunch with me?”
“I will be at the Golf Club,” she promised, “at one o’clock.”
Granet was conducted almost stealthily down the stairs and into the avenue. Half-way to the gate he paused to listen. He was hidden from sight now by the gathering twilight and the rolling mists. From behind the house came the softly muffled roar of the tide sweeping in, and, with sharper insistence, the whirr of machinery from the boathouse. Granet lit a cigarette and walked thoughtfully away. Just as he climbed into the car, a peculiar light through the trees startled him. He stood up and watched. From the top of the house a slowly revolving searchlight played upon the waters.
It was a very cheerful little party dining that night at the Dormy House Club. There was Granet; Geoffrey Anselman, his cousin, who played for Cambridge and rowed two; Major Harrison, whose leave had been extended another three weeks; and the secretary of the club, who made up the quartette.
“By-the-bye, where were you this afternoon, Captain Granet?” the latter asked. “You left Anselman to play our best ball. Jolly good hiding he gave us, too.”
“Went out for a spin,” Granet explained, “and afterwards fell fast asleep in my room. Wonderful air, yours, you know,” he went on.
“I slept like a top last night,” Major Harrison declared. “The first three nights I was home I never closed my eyes.”
Granet leaned across the table to the secretary.
“Dickens,” he remarked, “that’s a queer-looking fellow at the further end of the room. Who is he?”
The secretary glanced around and smiled.
“You mean that little fellow with the glasses and the stoop? He arrived last night and asked for a match this morning. You see what a miserable wizened-up looking creature he is? I found him a twelve man and he wiped the floor with me. Guess what his handicap is?”
“No idea,” Granet replied. “Forty, I should think.”
“Scratch at St. Andrews,” Dickens told them. “His name’s Collins. I don’t’ know anything else about him. He’s paid for a week and we’re jolly glad to get visitors at all these times.”
“Bridge or billiards?” young Anselman asked, rising.
“Let’s play billiards,” Granet suggested. “The stretching across the table does me good.”
“We’ll have a snooker, then,” Major Harrison decided.
They played for some time. The wizened-looking little man came and watched them benevolently, peering every now and then through his spectacles, and applauding mildly any particularly good stroke. At eleven o’clock they turned out the lights and made their way to their rooms. Shortly before midnight, Granet, in his dressing-gown, stole softly across the passage and opened, without knocking, the door of a room opposite to him. The wizened-looking little man was seated upon the edge of the bed, half-dressed. Granet turned the key in the lock, stood for a moment listening and swung slowly around.
“Well?” he exclaimed softly.
The tenant of the room nodded. He had taken off his glasses and their absence revealed a face of strong individuality. He spoke quietly but distinctly.
“You have explored the house?”
“As far as I could,” Granet replied. “The place is almost in a state of siege.”
“Proves that we are on the right track, any way. What’s that building that seems to stand out in the water?”
“How do you know about it?” Granet demanded.
“I sailed out this evening, hired a boat at Brancaster Staithe. The fellow wouldn’t go anywhere near Market Burnham, though, and I’m rather sorry I tried to make him. They’ve got the scares here, right enough, Granet. I asked him to let me the boat for a week and he wasn’t even civil about it. Didn’t want no strangers around these shores, he told me. When I paid him for the afternoon he was surly about it and kept looking at my field-glasses.”
Granet frowned heavily.
“It isn’t going to be an easy matter,” he confessed. “I hear the Admiralty are going to take over the whole thing within the next few days, and are sending Marines down. How’s the time?”
They glanced at their watches. It was five minutes before midnight. As though by common consent, they both crossed to the window and stood looking out into the darkness. A slight wind was moving amongst the treetops, the night was clear but moonless. About half a mile away they could just discern a corner of the club-house. They stood watching it in silence. At five minutes past twelve, Granet shut his watch with a click.
“Not to-night, then,” he whispered. “Collins!”
“Well?”
“What is going on in that wooden shanty?”
The little man dropped his voice.
“Germany lost two submarines in one day,” he murmured. “The device which got them came from that little workshop of Worth’s. The plans are probably there or on the premises somewhere.”
Granet groaned.
“As a matter of fact I have been within a few yards of the thing,” he said. “It was all fenced around with match-boarding.”
“Do you mean that you have been allowed on board theScorpion?”
Granet nodded.
“I had the rottenest luck,” he declared. “I took Miss Conyers and her friend down to see her brother, Commander Conyers. We were invited to lunch on board. At the last moment we were turned off. Through some glasses from the roof of the ‘Ship’ I saw some workmen pull down the match-boarding, but I couldn’t make out what the structure was.”
“I can give you an idea,” Collins remarked. “This fellow Worth has got hold of some system of concentric lenses, with extraordinary reflectors which enable him to see distinctly at least thirty feet under water. Then they have a recording instrument, according to which they alter the gradient of a new gun, with shells that explode under water. Von Lowitz was on the track of something of this sort last year, but he gave it up chiefly because Krupps wouldn’t guarantee him a shell.”
“Krupps gave it up a little too soon, then,” Granet muttered. “Collins, if we can’t smash up this little establishment there’ll be a dozen destroyers before long rigged up with this infernal contrivance.”
The little man stood before the window and gazed steadfastly out seawards.
“They’ll be here this week,” he said confidently. “You’d better go now, Granet. It’s all over for to-night.”
Granet nodded and left the room quietly. Every one in the Dormy House was sound asleep. He made his way back to his own apartment without difficulty. Only the little man remained seated at the window, with his eyes fixed upon the bank of murky clouds which lowered over the sea.