"No, that is true," said Baeza, who had been watching Hillyard's approach from the window.
"But I should like to know who our young friend is on the kerb opposite, and why he is standing sentinel."
Lopez Baeza laughed.
"He is the sign and token of the commercial activity of Spain."
From behind the curtains, stretched across the window, both now looked down into the street. A youth in a grey suit and a pair of orange-coloured buttoned boots loitered backwards and forwards over about six yards of footwalk; now he smoked a cigarette, now he leaned against a tree and idly surveyed the passers by. He apparently had nothing whatever to do. But he did not move outside the narrow limits of his promenade. Consequently he had something to do.
"Yes," continued Baeza with a chuckle, "he is a proof of our initiative. I thought as you do three days ago. For it is just three days since he took his stand there. But he is not watching this flat. He is not concerned with us at all. He is an undertaker's tout. In the house opposite to us a woman is lying very ill. Our young friend is waiting for her to die, so that he may rush into the house, offer his condolences and present the undertaker's card."
Hillyard left the youth to his gruesome sentry-go and turned back into the room. A man of fifty, with a tawny moustache, a long and rather narrow face and eyeglasses, was sitting at an office table with some papers in front of him.
"How do you do, Fairbairn?" Hillyard asked.
Fairbairn was a schoolmaster from the North of England, with a knowledge of the Spanish tongue, who had thrown up schoolmastering, prospects, everything, in October of 1914.
"Touching the matter of those ships," said Hillyard, sitting down opposite to Fairbairn.