"No!—I thought I should like to keep my wife for another hour or two!" There was a crisp, sharp order: "Go to her now, and steel her with this from me—that the aëroplane, when found, had been thoroughly gutted. The First Officer, who is English and one of our men, swears positively to this. The ’Gnome’ engine had been taken out of the stirrups, and the gyroscopic hovering-gear removed wholesale. Do you comprehend that this means—a pre-arranged thing? Listen!—I’ll pound it into you, confound you! Once—they have been picked up! Twice—they have been picked up! Three times—they have been picked up! Go to your wife and tell her so from me!" The speaker rang off. But he knew discouragement. The rapid march of events across the page of History since the Saturday of von Herrnung’s flight from Hendon had elicited a check from Official Headquarters. Without signing the book that all visitors must sign, and cooling your heels in the anteroom, you are to be admitted to the private sanctum at the War Office, Whitehall, and the presence of Britain’s Secretary of State for War. See him, seated square and upright in a high-backed leather-covered arm-chair behind a big green cloth covered mahogany desk, a thinnish, wide-shouldered man, with a nose of the beaky type, brown crisp hair sprinkled with grey receding from tall sunburned temples, and deep-set smallish blue eyes, a little weakened by much recent poring over State documents by electric-light. The British Government found it incompatible with its present line of Foreign Policy to take steps towards the recovery of the Foulis Papers. For forty-five years their duplicates had lain in safe-keeping at the War Office. They were there now. That was the Minister’s chief point. The Foulis War Engine had never been patented—never acquired by the British War Office. Such distinction or favour as the tenth Earl had received from Government had been conferred in recognition of the dead man’s gallant services to his country, not as the reward of his inventive gift. _Ergo_, the British Government could not concern itself with the theft of the original Plans from Gwyll Castle. To pursue and arrest the thief was the affair of the Head of the Clanronald family. If his lordship chose to drop the matter!—the Colonel’s celebrated Parliamentary shrug and smile conveyed the rest.