“No, she doesn’t,” said Peyrol, “she leaves poor people alone unless, I suppose, some craft acts suspiciously. I have seen her give chase to one or two. But even those she did not detain. Michel--you know Michel?--has heard from the mainland people that she has captured several at various times. Of course, strictly speaking, nobody is safe.” “Well, no. I wonder now what that Englishman would call ‘acting suspiciously.’” “Ah, now you are asking something. Don’t you know what an Englishman is? One day easy and casual, next day ready to pounce on you like a tiger. Hard in the morning, careless in the afternoon, and only reliable in a fight, whether with or against you, but for the rest perfectly fantastic. You might think a little touched in the head, and there again it would not do to trust to that notion either.” The lieutenant lending an attentive ear, Peyrol smoothed his brow and discoursed with gusto of Englishmen as if they had been a strange, very little-known tribe. “In a manner of speaking,” he concluded, “the oldest bird of them all can be caught with chaff, but not every day.” He shook his head, smiling to himself faintly, as if remembering a quaint passage or two. “You didn’t get all that knowledge of the English while you were a gunner,” observed the lieutenant dryly. “There you go again,” said Peyrol. “And what’s that to you where I learned it all? Suppose I learned it all from a man who is dead now. Put it down to that.” “I see. It amounts to this, that one can’t get at the back of their minds very easily.” “No,” said Peyrol, then added grumpily, “and some Frenchmen are not much better. I wish I could get at the back of your mind.” “You would find a service matter there, gunner, that’s what you would find there, and a matter that seems nothing much at first sight, but when you look into it, is about as difficult to manage properly as anything you ever undertook in your life. It puzzled all the big-wigs. It must have, since I was called in. Of course I work on shore at the Admiralty, and I was in the way. They showed me the order from Paris and I could see at once the difficulty of it. I pointed it out and I was told....” “To come here,” struck in Peyrol. “No. To make arrangements to carry it out.” “And you began by coming here. You are always coming here.” “I began by looking for a man,” said the naval officer with emphasis. Peyrol looked at him searchingly. “Do you mean to say that in the whole fleet you couldn’t have found a man?” “I never attempted to look for one there. My chief agreed with me that it isn’t a service for navy men.” “Well, it must be something nasty for a naval man to admit that much. What is the order? I don’t suppose you came over here without being ready to show it to me.” The lieutenant plunged his hand into the inside pocket of his naval jacket and then brought it out empty.