"What a pity! I am sorry," protested the Commodore. "It's my fault! There's nothing else to be said. I am to blame about it."
Martin Hillyard began to feel some compunction that he had ever suggested a fault in the composition of the telegram. But then, it was his business not to betray any such tenderness.
"If we could have in the future a little more information from London, it would save us a good deal of time," he said stonily. "Sometimes a surname is hurled at us, and will we find him, please, and cable home all details?"
"Yes, that is very wrong," the Commodore agreed. "We will have that changed." Then a bright idea appeared to occur to him. His face lighted up. "After all, in this instance the mistake hasn't done any real harm. For we have got our friend Mario Escobar now, and without these tubes and this letter from Berlin about the use of them and José Medina's account of the conversation in the next room we shouldn't have got him. The German governess wasn't enough. He's, after all, a neutral. Besides, there was nothing definite in his letter. But now——"
"Now you can deal with him?" asked Hillyard eagerly.
"To be sure," replied the Commodore. "We have no proof here to put him on his trial. But we have reasonable ground for believing him to be in communication with our enemies for the purpose of damaging us, and that's quite enough to lock him up until the end of the war."
He reached out his hand for the telephone and asked for a number.
"I am ringing up Scotland Yard," he said to Hillyard over the top of the instrument; and immediately Hillyard heard a tiny voice speaking as if summoned from another planet.
"Hallo!" cried Graham. "Is that you, A.C.? You remember Mario Escobar? Good. I have Hillyard here from the Mediterranean with a clear case. I'll come over and see you."
Mr. "A.C.", whose real name was Adrian Carruthers, thereupon took up the conversation at the other end of the line. The lines deepened upon the Commodore's forehead as he listened. Then he turned to Hillyard, and swore softly and whole-heartedly.