A good part of that last night in London, Napier spent in writing Nan a full account of the results of Singleton's visit to Lamborough. He wound up by warning her that Greta was in London, disguised as a Belgian refugee. Moreover, Scotland Yard would have full and accurate knowledge of those with whom the woman held any, even the slightest and most innocent, communication.
He sealed the letter and left it in the trusty keeping of his servant. The packet was not to go out of Day's hands except to be placed in those of Miss Ellis.
Napier's secret was well kept. His own family had so little idea of his change of plan that until he had cabled them from New York, they supposed him to have vanished, in the now familiar way, into the B. E. F.
Before ever the Atlantic liner left the docks, Napier's eyes, or rather, his ears, in the first instance, began to open. What they took in was the fact of the singular pervasiveness of the German tongue. On examining the speakers, they were seen to be men young or youngish and certainly Kriegsfähig. The stamp that the German system sets on the person who has been trained to military command differentiated certain of these foreign-speaking passengers from the ordinary reservist. There were at least four Germans of good military rank on board, no doubt calling themselves "Americans returning to their American homes." Here was a chance to observe at short range one of the greatest difficulties of those days: how was England to safeguard herself without wounding the susceptibilities of a friendly, but officially neutral, nation?
As he shouldered a way among his alien enemies, that new, involuntary hatred of the Teuton accent may have played some part in the rapture with which his ears greeted a voice not English, indeed, yet sounding for him its special harmonies.
He turned with a leap of the heart toward the voice that floated up from the crowd pressing to the gangway, a voice that called out to a porter something about a "green suit-case." Looking down from, the height of the tall ship, for all his hungry eagerness, he couldn't see the face that went with that voice, nothing but hats: men's soft felts and hard bowlers; the feathers and ribbons of ladies' headgear. Then came a moment when, among them all, a little cap of brown came slowly up on its golden wings till it landed Nan Ellis on the deck.
This latest manifestation of the cap of magic produced in Napier's mind a medley of instinctive joy, an utter bewilderment, and that readiness of acceptance, apparently without effort or cost, with which we greet those strokes of fortune whose strangeness throws us back on the essential mystery through which the most commonplace of us daily threads his way.
Her first words in another mouth would have been an intolerable irony:
"So this is how you go to the Front!" He was glad of the quick flush that rose to ask his pardon.
"To accept the worst construction on my being here," he answered, smiling, "I am not the only shuttle-cock."