The hubbub in the restaurant was tremendous. Well-dressed people can jostle and clamour and crush just as selfishly as anybody else, and those of the lunchers who were not near enough stood up on their chairs to get a better view. The musician picked himself up with a fried sole embossed on the back of his dress coat and two portions of hot soup running down his neck, to say nothing of blobs of mashed potato and the contents of overturned cruets all over him. "I've got one of you, anyhow," said Dennis in German, as he seized him by the collar. "You'd better have sat tight among your fiddles, and allowed Madame von Dussel to play her own dirty game." If the musician's look could have killed, there would have been another vacancy in the Reedshires. The cause of all the tumult confronted Dennis, purple with indignation, and began to bluster. But another officer had wormed himself resolutely forward through the crush. "I want to know what the deuce you mean, sir!" demanded the indignant major, but the new-comer interrupted him. "I am the Assistant Provost-Marshal," he said. "What is the meaning of this fracas?" "The explanation is very simple, sir," replied Dennis, handing him the slip of paper. "My friend and I were astonished to hear this officer talking so unguardedly. It is charitable to suppose that he has taken too much wine, and when I expostulated with him I recognised one of the waitresses as a remarkably clever German spy." The A.P.M. nodded. "I gathered that," he said. "I will ask you, gentlemen, to accompany me to the manager's room." And the excited crowd fell back to let them pass. As Dennis brought up the rear with his prisoner he met Bob coming in, and young Wetherby told him what had happened. "By Jove! it's a thousand pities we missed that woman," said the captain. "We haven't seen the end of that vixen and her husband." What happened in the manager's room it is not for us to reveal, but the placards of the evening papers had the startling announcement: "DRAMATIC CAPTURE OF A GERMAN SPY AT A WELL-KNOWN WEST-END RESTAURANT! ESCAPE OF HIS FEMALE ACCOMPLICE! BRITISH OFFICER'S WINE DRUGGED!" In the _Gazette_ a few days later was an announcement among the promotions: "2/12th Royal Reedshire Regiment, Captain Robert Oswald Dashwood to command the battalion with the rank of major. Second Lieutenant Dennis Dashwood to lieutenant." Probably none of the lunchers knew what that meant; it was not their affair. * * * * * Up the muddy road swung a brown detachment to the music of mouth organs, and Harry Hawke, who was lounging at the door of a big barn, chewing a woodbine and looking fed up with life generally, lifted his snub nose in the air as the head of the detachment came round a bend in the road. In an instant the sulky, discontented look vanished from his face, and he let off a yell.