“I’m feeling a bit bothered,” said Priscilla.
“We ought to have been back for luncheon,” said Frank. “I know that.”
“It’s not luncheon that’s bothering me; although it’s quite likely that we won’t be back for dinner either. What I can’t quite make up my mind about is what we ought to do next about those spies.”
“Go after them again to-morrow.”
“That’s all well enough; but things are much more mixed up than that. In some ways I rather wish we had Sylvia Courtney with us. She’s president of our Browning Society and tremendously good at every kind of complication. What I feel is that we’re rather like those boys in the poem who went out to catch a hare and came on a lion unaware. I haven’t got the passage quite right but you probably know it.”
Frank did. He could not, since English literature is still only fitfully studied in public schools, have named the author. But he quoted the lines with fluent confidence. It was by turning them into Greek Iambics that he had won the head-master’s prize.
“That’s it,” said Priscilla. “And that’s more or less what has happened to us. We went out to chase a simple, ordinary German spy and we have come on two other mysteries of the most repulsively fascinating kind. First there’s Miss Rutherford, if that’s her real name, who says she’s fishing for sponges, which is certainly a lie.”
“I don’t know about it’s being a lie,” said Frank. “She explained it to me after you’d gone.”
“Oh, that about zoophytes. You don’t believe that surely?”
“I do,” said Frank. “There are lots of queer things in the British Museum. I was there once.”