"Well, your old German servant, Mrs. Blake, sent one of these telegrams on Monday, August 10th. She explained that a stranger she met in the street had asked her to send it off. She was, it seems, kept under observation for a little while, after her connection with this telegram had been discovered, but in all the circumstances, the fact she was in your mother's service, and so on, she was given the benefit of the doubt." "But--but I don't understand even now?" said Rose slowly. "I'll explain. All these messages were from German agents in this country, who wished to tell their employers about the secret despatch of our Expeditionary Force. 'Boutet' meant Boulogne. Of course we have no clue at all as to how your old servant got the information." Rose suddenly remembered the day when Major Guthrie had come to say good-bye. A confused feeling of horror, of pity, and of vicarious shame swept over her. For the first time in her young life she was glad of the darkness which hid her face from her companion. The thought of seeing Anna now filled her with repugnance and shrinking pain. "I--I understand what you mean," she said slowly. "You must remember that she is a German. She probably regards herself in the light of a heroine!" The minutes dragged by, and it seemed to Mr. Reynolds that they had been waiting there at least half an hour, when at last he saw with relief the tall slim figure emerge through the great door of the Council House. Very deliberately James Hayley walked down the stone steps, and came towards them. When he reached the place where the other two were standing, waiting for him, he looked round as if to make sure that there was no one within earshot. "Rose," he said huskily--and he also was consciously glad of the darkness, for he had just gone through what had been, to one of his highly civilised and fastidious temperament, a most trying ordeal--"Rose, I'm sorry to bring you bad news. Anna Bauer is dead. The poor old woman has hanged herself. As a matter of fact, it was I--I and the inspector of police--who found her. We managed to get a doctor in through one of the side entrances--but it was of no use." Rose said no word. She stood quite still, overwhelmed, bewildered with the horror, and, to her, the pain, of the thing she had just heard. And then, suddenly, there fell, shaft-like, athwart the still, dark air, the sound of muffled thuds, falling quickly in rhythmical sequence, on the brick-paved space which melted away into the darkness to their left. "What's that?" exclaimed Mr. Reynolds. His nerves also were shaken by the news which he had just heard; but even as he spoke he saw that the sound which seemed so strange, so--so sinister, was caused by a tall figure only now coming out of the shadows away across the Market Place. What puzzled Mr. Reynolds was the man's very peculiar gait. He seemed, if one can use such a contradiction in terms, to be at once crawling and swinging along. "It's my husband!"