"It's about Belke. I'm afraid Phipps was quite right in saying I'm rather cold-blooded when I am keen over a job. Perhaps it becomes a little too much of a mere problem. Getting you to treat Belke as you did, for instance. You were very nice to him to-night--though he was too German to understand how you felt--and it struck me that very possibly you had been seeing a great deal of him, and he's a nice-looking fellow, with a lot of good stuff in him, a brave man, no doubt about it, and--well, perhaps you liked him enough to make you wish I hadn't let you in for such a job. I just wondered." She looked at him for an instant with an expression he did not quite understand; then she looked away and seemed for a moment a little embarrassed, and then she looked at him again, and he thought he had never seen franker eyes. "You're as kind and considerate as--as, well, as you're clever!" she said with a half laugh. "But, if you only knew, if you only even had the least guess how I've longed to do something for my country--something really useful, I mean; how unutterably wretched I felt when the trifling work I was doing was stopped by a miserable neglected cold and I had to have a change, and as I'd no money I had to take this stupid job of teaching; and how I envied the women who were more fortunate and really _were_ doing useful things; oh, then you'd know how grateful I feel to you! If I could make every officer in the German navy--and the army too--fall in love with me, and then hand them over to you, I'd do it fifty times over! Don't, please, talk nonsense, or think nonsense! Good-night, Mr Tiel, and perhaps it's good-bye." She laughed as she gave him his _nom-de-guerre_, and held out her hand as frankly as she had spoken. He did not take it, however. "I'm going to escort you over to Mrs Brown's," he said with a very different expression now in his eyes. "It's very good of you," she said; "you are sure you have time?" "Loads!" he assured her. He opened the door for her, but she stopped on the threshold. A young woman was waiting in the hall. "Mrs Brown has sent her girl to escort me," she said, "so we'll have to"--she corrected herself--"we must say good-night now. Is it good-bye, or shall I see you in the morning?" His face had become very long again. "I'm very much afraid not. I've got to report myself with the lark. Good-bye." The front door closed behind her, and Commander Blacklock strode back to the fire and gazed at it for some moments. "Well," he said to himself, "I suppose, looking at things as they ought to be looked at, Mrs Brown's girl has saved me from making a damned fool of myself! Now to work: that's my proper stunt." He threw some sheets of foolscap on the table, took out his pen, and sat down to his work. For about five minutes he stared at the foolscap, but the pen never made a movement. Then abruptly he jumped up and exclaimed-- "Dash it, I must!"