But by the next morning they had disappeared, presumably over the Swiss wire--that being their destination as revealed in their papers. But the English touring-car which brought them still remained in the Inn garage. Recklow spent hours examining it. Also the arrival and the departure of these three people was telephoned to Toul by Recklow, but Captain Herts still remained absent from Toul on duty and his department knew nothing about the details of the highly specialised and confidential business of Captain Herts. So John Recklow went back to his garden and waited, and smoked a short, dirty clay pipe, and played with his family of cats. Once or twice he went down at night to the French wire. All the sentries were friends of his. "Anybody been through?" he inquired. The answer was always the same: Nobody had been through as far as the patrol knew. "Where the hell," muttered Recklow, "did those three guys go?" A nightingale sang as he sauntered homeward. Possibly, being a French nightingale, she was trying to tell him that there were three people lying very still in the thicket near her. But men are stupid and nightingales are too busy to bother about trifles when there is courting to be done and nests to be planned and all the anticipated excitement of the coming new moon to preoccupy a love-distracted bird. On a warm, sunny day early in June, toward three o'clock in the afternoon, a peloton of French cavalry en vidette from Delle stopped a rather rickety touring-car several kilometres west of the Swiss frontier and examined the sheaf of papers offered for their inspection by the young man who drove the car. A yellow-haired girl seated beside him leaned back in her place indifferently to relax her limbs. From the time she and the young man had left Glenark in Scotland their progress had been a series of similar interruptions. Everywhere on every road soldiers, constables, military policemen, and gentlemen in mufti had displayed, with varying degrees of civility, a persistent curiosity to inspect such papers as they carried. On the Channel transport it was the same; the same from Dieppe to Paris; from Paris to Belfort; and now, here within a pebble's toss of the Swiss frontier, military curiosity concerning their papers apparently remained unquenched. The sous-officier of dragoon-lancers sat his splendid horse and gravely inspected the papers, one by one. Behind him a handful of troopers lolled in their saddles, their lances advanced, their horses swishing their tails at the murderous, green-eyed bremsers which, like other bloodthirsty Teutonic vermin, had their origin in Germany, and raided both French and Swiss frontiers to the cruel discomfort of horses and cattle.