Little did he realize when, on those jesting words, they parted, that, on the contrary, within twenty-four hours Desmond Okewood, late of the Secret Service, would have resumed his old career. He slept that night at the flat in Saint James’s Street, which he had kept on since his marriage as a _pied-à-terre_ in town. His wife, with the Okewood son and heir, was in Lancashire on a visit to her father, and Desmond had come up from a brief week-end with his brother, Francis, in Essex, to resume his duties at the War Office. At five minutes to eight on the following morning the telephone beside his bed rang deafeningly. At eight o’clock, very cross and sleepy, he put his ear to the burbling receiver. At a minute past eight he was sitting bolt upright in bed, alert and eager, listening to a well-known voice that came to him over the wire. It was the Chief who summoned him. When the head of the Secret Service summons, there is nothing for it but to obey. About three-quarters of an hour later, accordingly, Desmond Okewood entered the little office, skyed at the top of a lofty building near Whitehall, and once more saw the strong, familiar profile silhouetted against the long window that framed the broad panorama of river bathed in the morning sunshine. “Mornin’, young fellow!” was the well-remembered greeting. “I’ve got a job o’ work for you!” “You’ll wreck the home, sir,” protested his visitor. “You know I promised my wife when I married that I’d drop the game entirely.” The Chief seemed to be absorbed as he vigorously polished his tortoise-shell spectacles. “Clubfoot’s back!” he said. And, setting his glasses on his nose, he calmly surveyed the young man’s face. Clubfoot! Sometimes a mere name will instantly put time to flight and bring one face to face with yesterday. With a pang like the fleeting anguish of an old bad dream there flashed back into Desmond’s mind the image of the forbidding cripple whose path he had twice crossed. The fantastic vicissitudes of that long and perilous chase through war-bound Germany, when he and Francis had so miraculously eluded the long reach of Dr. Grundt to best him in the end; the thrilling duel of brains in which he and Clubfoot had engaged in that breathless treasure hunt in the South Seas—how visionary, how remote those adventures seemed from this quiet room, perched high above the streets, with the noise of the birds chirping on the roof and the dull bourdon of the traffic drifting with the winter sunshine through the open window!