Part 23 (2/2)

I went upstairs to find Blenkiron, washed and shaven, adht patent-leather shoes

'Why, dick, I've been wearying bad to see you I was nervous you would be blown to glory, for I've been reading awful things about your battles in the noospapers The war correspondents worry me so I can't take breakfast'

He lass onto write her a pretty little sonnet, but the darned rhys to say to you e've finished dinner'

Mary caht from the weather, and Blenkiron promptly fell abashed But she had a way to an an eood wishes, she put her arh, that set him completely at his ease

It was pleasant to eat off linen and china again, pleasant to see old Blenkiron's benignant face and the way he tucked into his food, but it was delicious for me to sit at a meal with Mary across the table It made me feel that she was really mine, and not a pixie that would vanish at a word To Blenkiron she bore herself like an affectionate but hter, while the desperately refined manners that afflicted hi like his everyday self They did , and I rereat box of chocolates, which you could no longer buy in Paris, and the two ate them like spoiled children I didn't want to talk, for it was pure happiness for one, with her elbows on the table like a schoolboy, her crisp gold hair a little ruusto, like some child who has been allowed down from the nursery for dessert and ar Blenkiron got to business

'You want to know about the staff-e've been busy on at home Well, it's finished now, thanks to you, dick We weren't getting on very fast till you took to peroosing the press on your sick-bed and dropped us that hint about the ”Deep-breathing” ads'

'Then there was so in it?' I asked

'There was black hell in it There wasn't any Gussiter, but there was a hty fine little syndicate of crooks with old , I started out to get the cipher It took soot hold of somehow if you know it's there, and in this case ere helped a lot by the return es in the German papers It was bad stuff e read it, and explained the darned leakages in iured to keep the thing going and turn Gussiter into a corporation with John S Blenkiron as president But it wouldn't do, for at the first hint of taot skeery and sent out SOS signals So we tenderly plucked the flowers'

'Gresson, too?' I asked

He nodded 'I guess your seafaring coh evidence to hang him ten times overBut that was the least of it For your little old cipher, dick, gave us a line on Ivery'

I asked how, and Blenkiron toldthat the organization of the 'Deep-breathing' game had its headquarters in Switzerland He suspected Ivery from the first, but thefro to deduce the Swiss business from Ivery he tried to deduce Ivery from the Swiss business He went to Berne and made a conspicuous public fool of hient of the A space in the press and put in spread-eagle announcements of his mission, with the result that the Swiss Government threatened to turn him out of the country if he tampered that amount with their neutrality He also wrote a lot of rot in the Geneva newspapers, which he paid to have printed, explaining hoas a pacifist, and was going to convert Germany to peace by 'inspirational advertise with his English reputation, and he wanted to make himself a bait for Ivery

But Ivery did not rise to the fly, and though he had a dozen agents working for him on the quiet he could never hear of the name Chelius That was, he reckoned, a very private and particular naood deal about the Swiss end of the 'Deep-breathing' business That took soirl who posed as a e in a big hotel at St Moritz His most important discovery was that there was a second cipher in the return es sent from Switzerland, different froot this cipher, but though he could read it he couldn'tout of it He concluded that it was a very secret means of communication between the inner circle of the Wild Birds, and that Iveryway fro that ot in touch with Ivery I must say she behaved like a sha to hiiven her in Paris, and suddenly she got an answer She was in Paris herself, helping to run one of the railway canteens, and staying with her French cousins, the de Mezieres One day he came to see her That showed the boldness of the man, and his cleverness, for the whole secret police of France were after hiht or sound Yet here he was coirl It showed another thing, which le-hearted in his job must have been pretty badly in love to take a risk like that

He came, and he called himself the Capitaine Bommaerts, with a transport job on the staff of the French GQG He was on the staff right enough too Mary said that when she heard that name she nearly fell down He was quite frank with her, and she with him They are both peacemakers, ready to break the laws of any land for the sake of a great ideal Goodness knohat stuff they talked together Mary said she would blush to think of it till her dying day, and I gathered that on her side it was a irl silliness

He caain, and they met often, unbeknown to the decorous Madane, and once, with a beating heart, she motored with him to Auteuil for luncheon He spoke of his house in Picardy, and there were athered, when he became the declared lover, to be rebuffed with a hoydenish shyness Presently the pace becau-distance telephone she went off to Douvecourt to Lady Manorwater's hospital She went there to escape fro in every limb, mind you-at the Chateau of Eaucourt Sainte-Anne

I had only to think of Mary to know just what Joan of Arc was NoIt wasn't recklessness It was sheer calculating courage

Then Blenkiron took up the tale The newspaper we found that Christmas Eve in the Chateau was of tremendous importance, for Bommaerts had pricked out in the advertisement the very special second cipher of the Wild Birds That proved that Ivery was at the back of the Swiss business But Blenkiron made doubly sure

'I considered the tih for valuable noos, so I sold the eneave your mind to ciphers and illicit correspondence, dick, you would know that the one kind of document you can't write on in invisible ink is a coated paper, the kind they use in the weeklies to print photographs of leading actresses and the stately hoates the surface a little, and you can tell with a ood fortune to discover just how to get over that little difficulty-horite on glazed paper with a quill so as the cutest analyst couldn't spot it, and likewise how to detect the writing I decided to sacrifice that invention, casting ood-sized bakery in returnI had it sold to the ene, but the tenth man from me-he was an Austrian Jew-did the deal and scooped fifty thousand dollars out of it Then I lay loatch how '

He took from his pocket a folded sheet of L'Illustration Over a photogravure plate ran so hand, as if written with a brush

'That page when I got it yesterday,' he said, 'was an unassu military medals There wasn't a scratch or a ripple on its surface But I got busy with it, and see there!'