“We’ll tell her right enough,” she said, “when we get home. She’ll be pretty mad, of course, inwardly; but she can’t say much on account of her principles.”
“I don’t see what her principles have to do with it.”
“Don’t you? Then you must be rather stupid. Can’t you see that if you haven’t really got a sprained ankle, but only believe you have, and wouldn’t have it if you believed you hadn’t, then we shouldn’t really be drowned, supposing we were drowned, I mean, which, of course, we’re not going to be—if we believed we weren’t drowned? And Aunt Juliet, with her principles, would be bound to believe we weren’t, even if we were. We’ve only got to put it to her that way and she won’t have a ghost of a grievance left. It’s the simplest form of Christian Science. But in any case, whatever silliness Aunt Juliet may indulge in, we were simply bound to have the Tortoise today. It’s a matter of duty. I don’t see how you can get around that, Cousin Frank, no matter how you argue.”
Frank did not want to get behind his duty. He had been brought up with a very high regard for the word. If it had been clearly shown him that it was his duty to take an ocean voyage in the Tortoise, with Priscilla as leader of the expedition, he would have bidden a long farewell to his friends and gone forth cheerfully. But he did not see that this particular sail, which seemed, indeed, little better than a humiliating, though agreeable, act of truancy, could possibly be sheltered under the name of duty. Priscilla enlightened him.
“I daresay you don’t know,” she said, “that there is a German spy at the present moment making a chart of this bay. We are hunting him.”
There is something intensely stimulating to every healthy mind in the idea of hunting a spy. No prefect in the world, no master even, not Mr. Dupré himself, not the remote divine head-master in the calm Elysium of his garden, could have escaped a thrill at the mention of such a sport. Frank was conscious of a sudden relapse from the serenity of the grown man’s common sense. For an instant he became a normal schoolboy.
“Rot!” he said. “What spy?”
“It’s not rot,” said Priscilla. “You’ve read ‘The Riddle of the Sands,’ I suppose. You must have. Well, that’s exactly what he’s at, mapping out mud-banks and things so as to be able to run a masked flotilla of torpedo boats in and out when the time comes. There was one of the same lot caught the other day sketching a fortification in Lough Swilly. Father read it to me out of a newspaper.”
Frank had seen a report of that capture. German spies have of late, been appearing with disquieting frequency. They are met with in the most unlikely places. Frank was a little shaken in his scepticism.
“What makes you say there’s a German spy?” he said