Lady Crandall gave her soldier-husband a peck on each cheek, and slapped back to her room. When he was alone again, General Crandall resumed his restless pacing. Resolution suddenly crystallized, and he stepped to the desk telephone. He called a number.
"That you, Bishop? ... General Crandall speaking.... Bishop, you were here on the Rock seven years ago? ... Good! ... Pretty good memory for names and faces, eh? ... Right! ... I want you to come to Government House for tea at five this afternoon.... But run over for a little talk with me some time earlier—an hour from now, say. Rather important.... You'll be here.... Thank you."
General Crandall sat at his desk and tried to bring himself down to the routine crying from accumulated papers there. But the canker Billy Capper had implanted in his mind would not give him peace. Major-general Crandall was a man cast in the stolid British mold; years of army discipline and tradition of the service had given to his conservatism a hard grain. In common with most of those in high command, he held to the belief that nothing existed—nothing could exist—which was not down in the regulations of the war office, made and provided. For upward of twenty-five years he had played the hard game of the service—in Egypt, in Burma, on the broiling rocks of Aden, and here, at last, on the key to the Mediterranean. During all those years he had faithfully pursued his duty, had stowed away in his mind the wisdom disseminated in blue-bound books by that corporate paragon of knowledge at home, the war office. But never had he read in anything but fluffy fiction of a place or a thing called the Wilhelmstrasse, reputed by the scriveners to be the darkest closet and the most potent of all the secret chambers of diplomacy. The regulations made no mention of a Wilhelmstrasse, even though they provided the brand of pipe clay that should brighten men's pith helmets and stipulated to the ounce an emergency ration. Therefore, to the official military mind at least, the Wilhelmstrasse was non-existent.
But here comes a beach-comber, a miserable jackal from the back alleys of society, and warns the governor-general of the Rock that he has a man from the Wilhelmstrasse—a spy bent on some unfathomable mission—in his very forces on the Rock. He says that an agent of the enemy has dared masquerade as a British officer in order to gain admission inside the lines of Europe's most impregnable fortress, England's precious stronghold, there to do mischief!
General Crandall's tremendous responsibility would not permit him to ignore such a warning, coming even from so low a source. Yet the man found himself groping blindly in the dark before the dilemma presented; he had no foot rule of precept or experience to guide him.
His fruitless searching for a prop in emergency was broken by the appearance of Jane Gerson in the door opening from Lady Crandall's rooms to the right of the library. The girl was dressed for the out-of-doors; in her arms was a fragrant bunch of blood-red roses, spraying out from the top of a bronze bowl. The girl hesitated and drew back in confusion at seeing the room occupied; she seemed eager to escape undetected. But General Crandall smilingly checked her flight.
"I—I thought you would be out," Jane stammered, "and——"
"And the posies——" the general interrupted.
"Were for you to enjoy when you should come back." She smiled easily into the man's eyes. "They'll look so much prettier here than in my room."
"Very good of you, I'm sure." General Crandall stepped up to the rich cluster of buds and sniffed critically. Without looking at the girl, he continued: "It appears to me as though you had already made a conquest on the Rock. One doesn't pick these from the cliffs, you know."