“This is all too impersonal,” Philippa objected. “Do you, in your heart, believe that the time might come when in the night we should hear the guns booming in Dreymarsh Bay, and see your grey-clad soldiers forming up on the beach and scaling our cliffs?”
“That will not be yet,” he pronounced. “It has been thought of. Once it was almost attempted. Just at present, no.”
Philippa drew a sigh of relief.
“Then your mission in Dreymarsh has nothing to do with an attempted landing?”
“Nothing,” he assured her. “I can even go a little further. I can tell you that if ever we do try to land, it will be in an unsuspected place, in an unexpected fashion.”
“Well, it's really very comforting to hear these things at first-hand,” Philippa declared, with some return to her usual manner. “I suppose we are really two disgraceful women, Helen and I—traitors and all the rest of it. Here we sit talking to an enemy as though he were one of our best friends.”
“I refuse to be called an enemy,” Lessingham protested. “There are times when individuality is a far greater thing than nationality. I am just a human being, born into the same world and warmed by the same sun as you. Nothing can alter the fact that we are fellow creatures.”
“Dreymarsh once more,” Philippa announced, looking out of the window. “And you're a terribly plausible person, Mr. Lessingham. Come round and see us after dinner—if it doesn't interfere with your work.”
“On the contrary,” he murmured under his breath. “Thank you very much.”