His eyes, in speaking, went to the bright-haired boy in Scout’s uniform standing near them, but von Herrnung’s glance had not followed his. The boy was staring wistfully at the round-faced clock on the front gable of the café restaurant—ten minutes to the half-hour and no sign of the Chief’s returning. Bawne’s courage began to ooze away at the ends of his fingers and toes. "Then," von Herrnung was beginning impatiently, when a sallow, undersized young man, whose hollow chest and inky paper cuffs advertised his clerical employment, came up, touched a pen sticking out from behind his ear, and said as Sherbrand turned to him: "Beg pardon, sir, but the telegraph-cabin is locked up proper, and Mr. Macrombie ’as carried orf the key." "Out of sorts to-day, is he?" Sherbrand asked meaningly, and the telegraph-clerk answered: "I’ve never seen ’im so bad before—in the middle of the month!" As Fate would have it, Macrombie, ex-Petty Officer Telegraphist of the R.N.—from whose sleeve the golden Crown and thunderbolt had been reft by reason of his anti-teetotal habits, had received a visit that morning from a friend who had repaid a debt. Hence the licensed operator of Fanshaw’s experimental and educational Wireless-station had succumbed to an attack of his intermittent complaint. Hear Macrombie’s assistant continuing the recital: "He’s left the aërial connected to the transmitter and gone out for lemon-squashes four times since one o’clock grub. ’That’s the drink for men who have souls to save, ye little fag-eater!’ he says to me; ’Salvation for soul and body, sucked through a straw! If thae deboshed and hopeless drunkards at the Admiralty could be induced to swear off their cursed alcohol and take to it, I wad no longer be deaved to the point of steeping my tongue in profanity, by the kind o’ eediots’ gibberish that is yammering at my lugs!’" "He’d been raking a lot of Admiralty strays in?" Sherbrand queried. Von Herrnung, who had been grinding his heel into the turf and gnawing his lip with ill-concealed impatience, turned his head sharply, and listened to the colloquy with all his ears.