"Well," he said at last, "you've utterly astounded me. Where did you hear this rumour?" "My friend Sir Boyle Huntley is very intimate with a man in the War Office--in the Intelligence Department in fact--and it came from him. So I think there's no doubt about it. A great pity, for Dr Jerrold was a first-class man, and highly respected everywhere." "Yes. If true, it is most terrible. But so many idle and ill-natured rumours get afloat nowadays--how, nobody can tell--that one doesn't know what to believe, if the information does not come from an absolutely reliable source." "What I've just told you does come from an absolutely reliable source," Rodwell assured him. "And as regards young Sainsbury, letters which he forgot and left behind him in his desk at the office are clear proof of his dealings with the enemy. In one was enclosed a ten-pound note sent as payment for information from somebody in Holland." "Is that really so? And he forgot it?" asked Trustram. "Well, I've had the letter and the banknote in my hand. Our managing-director found the correspondence, and showed it to me before he handed it over to Scotland Yard." "Well, I must say that I've never suspected either of them as traitors," declared the Admiralty official. "I liked young Sainsbury very much. He was a smart young fellow, I thought, and I know that Jerrold held him in very high esteem." "Ah! my dear Trustram," remarked Rodwell, with a sigh, "nowadays, with an avalanche of German gold doing its fell work in England, it is, alas! difficult to trust anybody. And yet it is all the fault of the Government, who seem afraid to offend Germany by interning our enemies. If I had my way I'd put the whole lot of them under lock and key, naturalised and unnaturalised alike. It is in that where the peril arises, for, in my opinion, the naturalised Germans in high places are suborning many of our men to become traitors and blackmailing them into the bargain--alas! that I, an Englishman, should be compelled to express such an opinion regarding my compatriots. Here you have two cases in point where apparently honest, well-meaning and patriotic Englishmen are branded as spies, with evidence--in one case certainly, that of Sainsbury--sufficient to convict him." "When will his trial be? Have you heard?" "No. You will be better able to discover that. It will, of course, be a secret court-martial." "In that case we shall never know either the nature of the charge--or of his defence." "Exactly," replied Lewin Rodwell, with grim inward satisfaction. "We shall only know the sentence."