“Your defense, then,” he summed it up, “is that under the protection of a German management a German agent entered your room, opened your trunk, concealed these papers in it, and repacked it. You believe that, eh?” It sounded wild enough, I acknowledged gloomily as I sat staring at the carpet with my elbows on my knees. “You’ve been a pretty fool, a pretty fool, a pretty fool!” the refrain sang itself unceasingly in my ears. I was disgusted with the episode, more disgusted yet with my own role. Why was I lying, why making myself by my present silence as well as by my former density the flagrant confederate of a clever spy? I shrugged my shoulders. “Oh, what’s the use?” I muttered. “No, of course I don’t believe it, and you won’t either if you are sane. It is too ridiculous. I might as well suggest that if the thief hadn’t been gone when they arrived, the manager and the detective would have shanghaied me, or the house doctor drugged me with a hypodermic till the fellow could get away. Let’s end all this! I’m ready to go ashore if you want to take me. In your place I know I should laugh at such a story; and I think that on general principles I should order the man who told it shot.” “Not necessarily, Mr. Bayne,” was the cool response of the Englishman. “The trouble with you neutrals is that you laugh too much at German spies. We warn you sometimes, and then you grin and say that it’s hysteria. But by and by you’ll change your minds, as we did, and know the German secret service for what it is--the most competent thing, the most widely spread, and pretty much the most dangerous, that the world has to fight to-day.” “You don’t mean,” I inquired blankly, “that you believe me?” It looks odd enough as I set it down. Ordinarily I expect my word to be accepted; but then, as a general thing I don’t suddenly discover that I have been chaperoning a set of German code-dispatches across the seas. “I mean,” he corrected with truly British phlegm, “that I can’t say positively your story is untrue. Here’s the case: Some one--probably Franz von Blenheim--wants to send these papers home by way of Italy and Switzerland. Your hotel manager tells him you are going to sail for Naples; you are an American on your way to help the Allies; it’s ten to one that nobody will suspect you and that your baggage will go through untouched. What does he do? He has the papers slipped into your wallet. Then he sends a cable to some friend in Naples about a sick aunt, or candles, or soap. And the friend translates the cable by a private code and reads that you are coming and that he is to shadow you and learn where you are stopping and loot your trunk the first night you spend ashore!” “I don’t grasp,” I commented dazedly; “why they should weave such circles. Why not let one of their own agents bring over the papers?” The lieutenant smiled a faint, cold, wintry smile.