"Bad. My friends are frantic," he replied. "All their plans have gone wrong. It is, I fear, our downfall. The Kaiser is mad. I have no money. I came to England in the middle of August. I have been to Portsmouth, to Rosyth, Hull, and Liverpool; now I am deserted. I was arrested yesterday near Manchester, though I had registered as German and thought myself safe. I was, as I have always been when in England, a teacher of languages. It covers so much," and he smiled. "Is not this meeting strange, eh? We have chatted together--and laughed together, too--in Nice, Florence, Rome--in many places. And now, monsieur, you have the laugh of me--eh? We must be beaten. Germany begins to know the truth." "No, not the laugh," I protested. "It is, as you say, the fortune of war that you have been taken." "Pass on, please," commanded the big constable gruffly at my elbow. "And you?--you will say nothing? Promise me, M'sieur Le Queux," von Sybertz urged again in French. "I have promised," was my reply. "You are arrested--for me, that is sufficient. I wish you no ill-will, though you are my enemy," I added. "Ah, yes, you are English!" exclaimed the spy. "I knew--I have known always that the English are gentlemen. _Au revoir_--and a thousand thanks for your promise." And my friend the spy--a man who, on account of his refined and gentlemanly bearing, and the money which had, for years, been at his command, was a particularly dangerous secret-agent of the Kaiser--lifted his shabby grey hat politely, and then passed dolefully on, with the big constable at his elbow, to the train which stood waiting to convey him to that barbed-wire enclosure high upon Frith Hill. I watched him pass out of my sight, while the crowd, on their part, watched me in wonder. I knew I had aroused the suspicions of the police by speaking in a foreign tongue. That meeting had been a strangely dramatic one. In those moments there came up before me visions of past meetings. Five years before, I had first known him living in a pretty white villa, with palms in front, on Mont Boron, outside Nice, and taking his lunch daily at the Reserve, at Beaulieu, one of the most expensive luncheon-places in Europe. I had met him in the Russie in Rome, in Doney's in Florence, and in the Pera Palace in Constantinople. He was a gay, merry companion, and half a dozen times I had been to variety theatres with him and to garish night-cafés afterwards. Yet I knew him to be a German international spy, and so intimate had we become that he had scarcely taken the trouble to conceal the fact from me.