"My dear boy, I have always liked your reckless audacity. I sympathize heartily with you in your distaste for police surveillance. But that you should consistently give the police the slip, and career about here, alone in your car, when the men responsible for your safety believed that you were fast asleep, in bed, in town--in the present state of the country, the risks, for you, for us, were altogether too great. Think what our position would have been if anything had happened to you! But for some time past, from the day of the Duke's visit to us, those risks have been avoided. Scotland Yard have been on their mettle. They have never lost sight of you. When I went downstairs, just before lunch, I found half a dozen plain clothes men making themselves comfortable in the kitchen. They have grown quite at home with us. And today, they tell me, special precautions are being taken. A battalion of the Guards, I understand, is to put a picket line round the house. My dear boy, restrain your impatience! You will not see them. The police have strict orders never to intrude their presence upon you. The military, I have no doubt, will have similar orders. From the first, the Duke has been as anxious--as any of us--that you should continue to enjoy the full benefits of your incognito, here, in Paradise. "And that brings me, having finished my own explanations, to the explanation which I am so eager to demand from you, in turn, my boy. How did the Duke contrive that you should come here, in the present crisis--they told me downstairs that Martial Law has been proclaimed!--without betraying the fact that he had been here himself?" All the King's senses had been numbed by the rapid succession of surprises with which Uncle Bond had attacked him. His capacity for wonder had long since been exhausted. It seemed to him now that nothing would ever surprise him again. A feeling of utter helplessness oppressed him. It seemed to him that he was in the grip, that he had been made the plaything, of an implacable, an irresistible power. But Uncle Bond's question served to arouse a momentary flash of his old self-assertion within him. He had been deceived, he had been managed, he had been fooled to the top of his bent--but, in this matter, at any rate, he had asserted himself; in this matter, at any rate, he had had his own way. "The Duke did not contrive that I should come here," he exclaimed. "I chose to come here. It was--my way of going on strike." "You startled me by saying something like that before, my boy," Uncle Bond remarked. "What do you mean, precisely, by--your way of going on strike?"