Lady Edna turned ghastly white and clutched Baltazar’s arm to steady herself from the sickening shock. In the desperate rush, after Godfrey’s departure, the scheming, the packing, the telephoning, the temporary straightening of affairs, the chase over London for the complaisant friend whose connivance was essential, the eagerness to get free of the house before her husband should return, she had forgotten the scrap of paper in her secret drawer, with its obsolete information. Now the horror flashed on her. Her husband had gone to the drawer before. Hence the article in Fordyce’s paper. Her first instinct had been right. He had gone to the drawer again. Her swaying brain wondered how he had discovered the secret of the spring. But he had found the paper which in her folly she had not destroyed—and what else besides? She heard, as in a dream, her husband saying: “If he isn’t your lover, what about these? Here’s proof. Here’s a matter of court-martial and gaol.” She regained her self-control with a great effort, still holding to Baltazar. “You hound!” she whispered. Baltazar, smitten with the realization that comedy had vanished—the comedy in which he had played so debonair and masterly a part—vanished in the flash of a cinematographic film, and that something very near tragedy was staring him in the face, stretched out his hand for the papers. “Let me see.” But Donnithorpe smiled his thin, derisive smile. “No. They’re too precious. I’ll hold them for you to look at. Keep away.” And there, in the airless glass-roofed railway station, on that hot summer afternoon, in the midst of the reverberating noises of trains letting off steam, of a thousand human voices, of scurrying feet, of grating luggage trunks, in the midst of a small town’s moving and lounging population, surging now, at that hour’s height of the suburban traffic with home-going streams; there, with hundreds of eyes to watch them, hundreds of ears to hear them, hundreds of successive ears of people darting bee-like around the busy bookstall not ten yards away, there three quietly talking human beings stood at grips with destiny. “This is written on your notepaper. It is a War Office secret. It reveals the whole strategy of the High Command.” Baltazar’s lips grew grim and his eyes bent on the little man burned like fires. In Donnithorpe’s hands the document was Godfrey’s death warrant. Then Baltazar remembered the shock he had received in Sheepshanks’s room at Cambridge when first he saw a letter of Godfrey’s, and Godfrey’s after explanation of the identity of their handwriting. “Don’t you see? It gives the whole thing away,” Donnithorpe continued. “I’m quite aware of it,” said Baltazar. “I drew it up for your wife.” “You?” exclaimed Donnithorpe in incredulous amazement, while Lady Edna caught a sharp breath and clung more fiercely to Baltazar’s arm. “Where did you get your information from?”