"Get on with it, then," the lady urged. "He may come in at any moment."
"Can you tell me in which direction his sympathies lie with regard to the war?"
Miss Pamela Keane was for a moment serious. Then she shrugged her shoulders.
"Well, you know," she said, "there are a good many of us Americans who think that Great Britain's been asking for trouble for some years back. A little too much of the Lord Almighty, you know. I shouldn't say that Jack was overmuch in sympathy with you Britishers."
"That helps," Aaron Rodd admitted. "In two or three days at the most I think I can let you have a report. So far as I can see at present," he added, "I think that it will be satisfactory to you."
"Say, you're smarter than you look, Mr. Rodd," she declared, as she turned away with a little nod. "Come round and see me any time."
The two men finished their luncheon and walked round to Scotland Yard. Inspector Ditchwater, for whom they enquired, received them with some surprise.
"Gentlemen," he said, "this is a most unexpected pleasure."
"We have come," Aaron Rodd began, "to lay certain information before you which has come to me professionally, and to ask for your aid. The facts are these. A certain Mrs. Abrahams, who is a German woman by birth, married to an anglicised German Jew, who was naturalised fifteen years ago, is in the habit of receiving a little circle of friends every afternoon. These friends are every one of them of more or less German sympathies, although they some of them occupy public posts in this country. One of them, I have reason to know, is receiving money continually from Mrs. Abrahams. I have no proof of anything, and I am not in a position to proceed far enough in the matter to secure it. The authority of the law is needed. My friend here, Mr. Cresswell, has been to the Home Office and has interviewed Sir Lionel Rastall. He, however, declines to intervene in the matter because Mrs. Abrahams, who is a woman of a great deal of superficial culture and many acquaintances, is a friend of several Cabinet Ministers."
"If Sir Lionel declines to interfere," the inspector pointed out, "what can we do?"