‘No,’ said Hammond. ‘It’s wrong. You, for example, May, you squander half your force with women. You’ll never really do what you should do, with a fine mind such as yours. Too much of it goes the other way.’

‘Maybe it does...and too little of you goes that way, Hammond, my boy, married or not. You can keep the purity and integrity of your mind, but it’s going damned dry. Your pure mind is going as dry as fiddlesticks, from what I see of it. You’re simply talking it down.’

Tommy Dukes burst into a laugh.

‘Go it, you two minds!’ he said. ‘Look at me...I don’t do any high and pure mental work, nothing but jot down a few ideas. And yet I neither marry nor run after women. I think Charlie’s quite right; if he wants to run after the women, he’s quite free not to run too often. But I wouldn’t prohibit him from running. As for Hammond, he’s got a property instinct, so naturally the straight road and the narrow gate are right for him. You’ll see he’ll be an English Man of Letters before he’s done. A.B.C. from top to toe. Then there’s me. I’m nothing. Just a squib. And what about you, Clifford? Do you think sex is a dynamo to help a man on to to success in the world?’

Clifford rarely talked much at these times. He never held forth; his ideas were really not vital enough for it, he was too confused and emotional. Now he blushed and looked uncomfortable.

‘Well!’ he said, ‘being myself HORS DE COMBAT, I don’t see I’ve anything to say on the matter.’

‘Not at all,’ said Dukes; ‘the top of you’s by no means HORS DE COMBAT. You’ve got the life of the mind sound and intact. So let us hear your ideas.’

‘Well,’ stammered Clifford, ‘even then I don’t suppose I have much idea...I suppose marry–and–have–done–with–it would pretty well stand for what I think. Though of course between a man and woman who care for one another, it is a great thing.’

‘What sort of great thing?’ said Tommy.

‘Oh...it perfects the intimacy,’ said Clifford, uneasy as a woman in such talk.

‘Well, Charlie and I believe that sex is a sort of communication like speech. Let any woman start a sex conversation with me, and it’s natural for me to go to bed with her to finish it, all in due season. Unfortunately no woman makes any particular start with me, so I go to bed by myself; and am none the worse for it...I hope so, anyway, for how should I know? Anyhow I’ve no starry calculations to be interfered with, and no immortal works to write. I’m merely a fellow skulking in the army...’

Silence fell. The four men smoked. And Connie sat there and put another stitch in her sewing...Yes, she sat there! She had to sit mum. She had to be quiet as a mouse, not to interfere with the immensely important speculations of these highly–mental gentlemen. But she had to be there. They didn’t get on so well without her; their ideas didn’t flow so freely. Clifford was much more hedgy and nervous, he got cold feet much quicker in Connie’s absence, and the talk didn’t run. Tommy Dukes came off best; he was a little inspired by her presence. Hammond she didn’t really like; he seemed so selfish in a mental way. And Charles May, though she liked something about him, seemed a little distasteful and messy, in spite of his stars.

“Well?” asked Von Bork eagerly, running forward to meet his visitor.

For answer the man waved a small brown-paper parcel triumphantly above his head.

“You can give me the glad hand to-night, mister,” he cried. “I’m bringing home the bacon at last.”

“The signals?”

“Same as I said in my cable. Every last one of them, semaphore, lamp code, Marconi — a copy, mind you, not the original. That was too dangerous. But it’s the real goods, and you can lay to that.” He slapped the German upon the shoulder with a rough familiarity from which the other winced.

“Come in,” he said. “I’m all alone in the house. I was only waiting for this. Of course a copy is better than the original. If an original were missing they would change the whole thing. You think it’s all safe about the copy?”

The Irish-American had entered the study and stretched his long limbs from the armchair. He was a tall, gaunt man of sixty, with clear-cut features and a small goatee beard which gave him a general resemblance to the caricatures of Uncle Sam. A half-smoked, sodden cigar hung from the corner of his mouth, and as he sat down he struck a match and relit it. “Making ready for a move?” he remarked as he looked round him. “Say, mister,” he added, as his eyes fell upon the safe from which the curtain was now removed, “you don’t tell me you keep your papers in that?”

“Why not?”

“Gosh, in a wide-open contraption like that! And they reckon you to be some spy. Why, a Yankee crook would be into that with a canopener. If I’d known that any letter of mine was goin’ to lie loose in a thing like that I’d have been a mug to write to you at all.”

“It would puzzle any crook to force that safe,” Von Bork answered. “You won’t cut that metal with any tool.”

“But the lock?”

“No, it’s a double combination lock. You know what that is?”

“Search me,” said the American.

“Well, you need a word as well as a set of figures before you can get the lock to work.” He rose and showed a double-radiating disc round the keyhole. “This outer one is for the letters, the inner one for the figures.”

“Well, well, that’s fine.”

“So it’s not quite as simple as you thought. It was four years ago that I had it made, and what do you think I chose for the word and figures?”

“It’s beyond me.”

“Well, I chose August for the word, and 1914 for the figures, and here we are.”

The American’s face showed his surprise and admiration.

“My, but that was smart! You had it down to a fine thing.”

“Yes, a few of us even then could have guessed the date. Here it is, and I’m shutting down to-morrow morning. ”

“Well, I guess you’ll have to fix me up also. I’m not staying in this goldarned country all on my lonesome. In a week or less, from what I see, John Bull will be on his hind legs and fair ramping. I’d rather watch him from over the water.”