All that Napier thought was Nan! Nan! How much does she know? And how is she taking it?
"They must have found out I'd gone to give Boris and Ivan a run on the sands. Greta and the rest were up on the sea-wall. They never dreamed that those two dreadful young men, standing there as if they were friends, pretending to admire the boarhounds, were secret service people, sent down by the Intelligence Department. And what they were really saying—at least the one who does the talking! I was thinking only last night while Julia was brushing my hair—things often come to me like that—I suddenly remembered that I couldn't—not if I was to be hanged for it—I couldn't remember a syllable the fat young man had uttered. It's my belief he's a deaf mute. Well, the other one said, if something wasn't done at once, if I didn't use my great influence with my husband to have the German lady sent out of England, there would be a scandal. Everybody would say we had harbored a suspect after we'd been warned. And when he saw I wasn't going to do what he wanted, what do you think he called Greta? A spy, who handed on official information to the enemies of the country! Things have got out that they blame poor Greta for. Oh, isn't it an awful penalty to pay for her loyalty in sticking to us as she's done through thick and thin!
"Well, these secret service men—one very worrying thing about them: I don't know how to treat such people; they seem to be quite superior to their disgusting work—well, they pretend that for her sake, for Greta's, I ought—Heavens above! here they are again!" Lady McIntyre collapsed against her cushions, breathing heavily and staring fascinated at the door opposite the one by which Napier had come in. Napier, too, could hear them now—those footsteps.
The knock on the door must have been expected and couldn't have been more discreet, yet at the sound Lady McIntyre lost her head. Instead of saying, "Come in!" she remarked in a smothered undertone, "I told McAndrews to bring them up the back stairs."
The door opened. "Mr. Singleton, Mr. Grindley, m'lady."
Two young men came in. Well groomed, wearing well-creased trousers, holding their hats and walking sticks. Singleton, taller, a year or two the older, was a well-set-up person, with dark mustache, and frank, hazel eyes. "Where have I seen the fellow?" Napier asked himself, reading recognition in the guarded smile. They both greeted the lady.
"Isn't, after all!" Lady McIntyre jerked out in a confidential aside to Napier, upon the supposed deaf-mute's audible salutation. Neither was Mr. Grindley so very fat either, merely inclined to stoutness. Fair, slow, slightly bored; his prominent, gray-green eyes seemed gently to seek vacuity. Whether dullard or dreamer, this was certainly the last person you would pick out of a crowd for the errand on which he had come. This plump young man looked at ease, for the reason that he didn't care, or had forgotten where he was; the other one seemed to be at ease because he had never, in any place, been anything else. During the pause, which Lady McIntyre found agitating, Mr. Singleton stood there a step in advance of his companion, the hands that held his hat, with gloves tucked in the brim, crossed on the knob of his walking stick. And suddenly Napier remembered. This frank-looking young man with the long chin had been sent down from Oxford in Napier's first year. He had done what he could to shield the culprit, though they had never been friends.
Napier was the first to move, after McAndrews had shut the door behind him. It was not mere restlessness on Napier's part, nor detestation of the business these fellows had come about. He felt he must go and look out into the front hall. If Nan were to come in suddenly—
There was no one. Napier leaned against the wall, standing where, through the door ajar, he could command the stairs.
"We heard,"—Singleton in his cheerful, cultivated tones was saying to Lady McIntyre—"we heard the gentleman you were waiting for had arrived."