"Forgive me, both of you," he begged. "I fear that I am a little irritable to-night. This constant espionage gets on one's nerves. Look at them all around us,--Crawshay in the corner, trying his best to get something incriminating out of Nora Sharey; Brightman smoking a cigar out there, with his eyes wandering all the time through the glass screen towards this table; and the young man who seemed to haunt your hotel, Miss Beverley--Henshaw I believe his name is--you see him dining there with his back turned ostentatiously towards us and a little pocket mirror by his side. There are three pairs of eyes that scarcely ever leave us. I don't know whether they expect me to produce my spoils from my pocket and lay them upon the table, or whether one of them is a student of the lip language and hopes to learn the secrets of our conversation. Bah! They are very stupid, this professional potpourri of secret-service agents and detectives. Can't you hear them, how they will whisper in the lobby after we have left? 'Jocelyn Thew is entertaining a young Flying Corps man on leave from the front, the brother of Miss Beverley, who has already helped him. What does that mean?' Then they will put their fingers to their noses and you, too, will probably be watched, Dick. They will congratulate themselves upon possessing the subtlety of the Devil. They will see through my scheme. They will say--'This young man is to drop the documents behind the German lines!' Don't be alarmed, Richard, if you find a secret service man in your bedroom when you get home to-night." Katharine laughed almost joyously. "Then you're not going to ask Dick to do anything of that sort?" she demanded, her tone indicating an immense relief. He smiled. "I am not going to ask your brother to do anything which is so palpably obvious," he replied. "His help I am certainly going to engage, but in a manner which is very unlikely to bring trouble upon him. I promise you that." She suddenly leaned across the table. The cloud had passed from her features, the dull weight from her heart. Her eyes were more eloquent even than her tremulous lips. "Mr. Thew," she said, "do you know that I have always had one conviction about you, and that is that all these strange adventures in which you have taken part--some of them, as you yourself have acknowledged, more creditable than others--you have entered into chiefly from that spirit of adventure, just the spirit in which Dick here," she added with a little shiver, "made his mistake. Why can't you satisfy that part of your nature as Dick is doing? This war, upon which we Americans looked so coldly at first, has become almost a holy war, a twentieth-century crusade. Why don't you join one of these irregular forces and fight?" Then they both witnessed what they had never before seen in Jocelyn Thew. They saw his eyes blaze with a sudden concentrated fury. They saw his lips part and something that was almost a snarl transform and disfigure his mouth.