“Ah!” she exclaimed. “You mean that the running down of these Japanese spies must result in disclosing father’s whereabouts?” “Japanese spies!” His lips curled contemptuously. “They exist only in the imagination of Appleby and Hemingway.” “Precisely what I thought, too, when the major told me,” she said. “I know, of course, that all the foreign nations keep secret agents hanging around our forts and army posts, just as we do around theirs; but that any of these men would go to such lengths struck me, on the face of it, as ridiculous.” “There you are wrong,” Grail returned. “Ordinarily, I grant, you would be right; but the colonel’s present series of experiments being concerned with a new and surprising development in the use of the wireless in warfare, has stirred these fellows up to a pitch where they have been ready to dare almost anything. Besides, the chap who, I am convinced, engineered this deal----” He caught himself just as he was on the verge of revealing to her the point which had caused him most concern in the affair. Dexterously he extricated himself from the situation by knocking a book from the desk with his elbow and stooping over to regain it. “As I was about to say,” he resumed, “the chap who engineered this deal was not a Japanese, but of a nation which furnishes spies of an even more bold and subtle character.” He drew from his pocket the half-smoked cigarette which formed his principal clew. “Are you sufficiently versed in such things to tell me of what make this is?” he asked. “Russian,” she replied, without a moment’s hesitation. “The little countess we used to know in Washington, you remember, smoked cigarettes exactly like that.” “Exactly,” he said, “and the man for whom we have got to look in this case is a Russian.” A thoughtful look came into Meredith’s eyes. “Dad was in Russia once, on secret-service business himself,” she said; “and although they would never tell me about it, mother confessed to me on one occasion that for a long time she had been fearful of an attempt at revenge upon him, for something that happened while he was on the mission. You don’t suppose, do you, that this could in any way be an outcome of that old affair?” “Absurd!” he answered. “Why, it was almost twenty years ago that your father was over there. If there was anything coming to him on that score, I fancy he would have been called to account long before this.” Then, he deftly turned the subject to a discussion of the facts from which he had built up the hypothesis he was following.