"In Mexico, Cuba, Nicaragua, Uraguay. You're right. I've been out of the world. I crept out of it deliberately. When I left here, nothing seemed so hopeless as the thought that a time of justice might come. I cut myself off even from news. I have lived without a name and without a future." "Maybe for the best," Hagan declared cheerfully. "Remember that it's but twelve months ago since your pardon was signed, and you'd have done ill to have found your way back before then.--But what about this mission you spoke of?" Sir Denis looked down the table. Of servants there was only old Timothy at the sideboard, and of those who were gathered around his board there was not one whom he could doubt. "I will tell you about that," he promised, leaning a little forward. "You have read of the documents and the famous stolen letter which were supposed to have been brought over to England in a certain trunk, protected by the seal of a neutral country?" "Why, sure!" Michael Dilwyn murmured under his breath. "The box was to have been opened at Downing Street, but one heard nothing more of it." "The stolen letter," Hagan remarked, "was supposed to have been indiscreet enough to have brought about the ruin of a great man in America." Sir Denis nodded. "You've got the story all right," he said. "Well, those papers never were in that trunk. I brought them over myself in the _City of Boston_. I brought them over under the nose of a Secret Service man, and although the steamer and all of us on board were searched from head to foot in the Mersey before we were permitted to land." "And where are they now?" Michael Dilwyn asked. Sir Denis drew a long envelope from his pocket and laid it upon the table before him. Almost as he did so, another little sensation brought them all to their feet. They hurried to the window. From about a mile out seaward, a blue ball, followed by another, had shot up into the sky. Sir Denis watched for a moment steadily. Then he pointed to a bonfire which had been lighted on the beach. "That," he pointed out, "is my signal, and there is the answer. The documents you have all read about are in that envelope." There was a queer, protracted silence, a silence of doubt and difficulty. "It will be a German submarine, that," Michael Dilwyn declared. "She has come to pick up your papers, maybe?" "That's true," was the quiet answer. "I was to light the fire on the beach the moment I arrived. The blue balls were to be my answer." The O'Clory, a big, silent man, leaned over and laid his hand on his host's shoulder. "What are you going to do about it?" he demanded. "For the moment I do not know," Sir Denis confessed. "Advise me, all of you. I undertook this enterprise partly because of its danger, partly for a great sum of money which I should have handed over to our cause, partly because if I succeeded it would hurt England. Now I have come back and I find you all moved by a different spirit."