Lord Chelsford nodded.
"I thought that you would ask that," he said. "It is not altogether an easy question to answer. Remember this. The French War Office are to-day in possession of an altogether false scheme of our proposed defences—a scheme which, if they continue to regard it as genuine, should prove nothing short of disastrous to them. Only you and I are in the secret at present. Positively I did not feel that I cared to extend that knowledge to a single other person."
"But you might have told Colonel Ray and the Duke separately," I remarked. "The Duke has never been my friend, and Ray has other causes for being angry with me just at present; but between them they rescued me from something like starvation, and it is terrible for them to think of me as they are doing now."
Lord Chelsford poured himself out a glass of wine, and held it up to the light for a moment.
"Mr. Ducaine," he said, "a secret is a very subtle thing. Though the people who handle it are men of the most unblemished honour and reputation, still the fewer they are, the safer the life of that secret."
"But the Duke and Colonel Ray!" I protested.
"I might remind you," Lord Chelsford said, smiling, "that those are precisely the two persons who shared with you the knowledge of the word which opened the safe."
I laughed.
"I presume that you do not suspect either of them?" I remarked.
"The absurdity is obvious," Lord Chelsford answered. "But the force of my former remark remains. I like that secret better when it rests between you and me. It means, I know, that for a time—I promise you that it shall be only for a time—you must lose your friends, but the cause is great enough, and it should be within our power to reward you later on."