It was one of those mild unseasonable days on which the best of servants keep up the biggest fires; the doctor opened the French window that led from his den, down rusty steps, into a foul and futile enclosure of grimy gravel and moribund shrubs. In the meantime Edenborough had not taken a seat as mechanically bidden, but had planted himself in defiant pose before the fire; and the glow showed restless hands twitching into fists, but not the face of which one look had been enough. "You might have left word where you were!" he began with great bitterness. "I have just done so," returned Dollar, "at your rooms. I was wanting to see you--presently. It seems like fate, to find you here before me." "I suppose you've heard the latest, wherever you've been?" pursued Edenborough, aware and jealous of some independent perplexity on the part of Dollar. "I have heard so much!" said the doctor, dropping into a chair. "Better be explicit--and as expeditious as you can, my dear fellow. I have an appointment almost directly." "Oh! there's not much to say," rejoined the other sardonically. "You remember when you came to Prince's, doctor?" "I do, indeed." They both spoke as if it were weeks ago. "You know I told you I'd had a hard day out of town?" "I remember." "I meant with my chief--Lord Stockton--seeing his new brood of submarines." "In their unfledged state, I suppose?" "That was it--and making the usual sketches. That's my job--or was! I was Stockton's walking Kodak until yesterday afternoon; then I got the boot for a wedding present, and a chance of the jug for my honeymoon!" The harsh voice broke, for all its sudden slang and satire. Dollar was driven to his only policy. "I'm not going to pretend I don't know of this," he said. "I know of it from the Home Secretary. A duplicate of one of those last drawings of yours----" "A duplicate!" "Well, a bad imitation, if you like." The doctor paused as though he had finished a sentence, as though the amended phrase had interrupted his thought. "Well?" said Edenborough grimly. "Did you hear how they got hold of it?" "Intercepted in the post, I gathered, on its way abroad." "In our post," said Edenborough. "Almost a _casus belli_ in itself, I should have thought!" "And have you no idea how it came there?" asked the doctor bluntly--but now he meant to be blunt; he was not sorry when his man flew into a feeble passion on the spot. "What the devil do you mean, Doctor Dollar? I know no more about the matter than--I was going to say, than you do--but I begin to think you know more than you pretend!" "I didn't think I had pretended," said Dollar, simply. "Well, what _do_ you know?" demanded Edenborough, in a fury of suspicion. "All, I suppose?" he added, with a schoolboy sneer, when the answer was slow to come. "Yes; all," said the doctor, very gravely and reluctantly, as though driven into a pronouncement of life or death.