"You swine," he said. "I'll----" The man from Stettin suddenly felt his heart stop beating. He stood petrified for a moment; then he clutched the table with one feverish movement; and when he saw the pale cherub face, he became covered at once with perspiration. Then the terror, which had paralyzed him a second or so, gave way to the wild instinct of self-preservation. He hit out wildly with both arms, kicking out at the same moment. In a second he was out in the hall, and had locked the door behind him. A door opened somewhere outside, and they heard him running down the garden. Some of the men snatched their rifles, rushed to the window, and threw it open. Four or five shots rang out simultaneously, and the stench of cordite was wafted back on the sharp morning air as the man from Stettin fell in a crumpled heap, his face buried in a clump of violets. The sergeant went into the garden. "Hum!" he remarked after an instant, "dead, did you say? He's as dead as a doornail ... anyway, it's nothing to do with us! If ever a soul went straight to hell," he muttered to himself, "it was that red devil's." IV THE STORY OF A SPY Donald McNab, private (and distinguished ornament) of the London Regiment, leaned his elbows on the little oak table in the bar of the "Three Nuns," and eyed me with withering contempt. From a corner of the settle I stared--with a wholly unsuccessful attempt to look unconcerned--at a quaint old painting of Sergeant Broughton who first taught Englishmen to box scientifically. When the great are really wrathful it ill becomes pigmy people to jabber or argue. So I waited with bent head and respectful silence to which the passing moods of such an erratic genius are entitled. When McNab and I had met an hour or so before we had been on the most friendly terms. We had both ordered our pint of beer, filled our pipes, and retired to a corner in the bar parlour feeling at peace with the world--barring of course the German Empire and their allied forces. Everything, in fact, made for peace and goodwill between us; yet, because I had spoken with some levity about our incomplete spy system, McNab's wrath had come down on my head like the proverbial "hundred of bricks." "It seems strange," I had remarked to him, "that the Huns can always forestall our most carefully-prepared plans through their almost perfect spy system. Our fellows must be dead stupid at the game. Why aren't these German vipers ever nabbed?" "Dead stupid!" McNab had exclaimed, after gazing at me for a minute in dazed stupefaction at my unspeakable temerity in challenging the proficiency of the British Army. "Get under your Blanco pot!" Now, when McNab used this picturesque term to me I knew that there was a storm brewing. He only used the expression when he wished to be particularly "cutting," and I received his reproof with, I hope, a correct realisation of my own insignificance.