"Ring him up," said the Home Secretary.
It was at six removes, and took just over ten minutes. The man in the outer room rang up the department, which told the section, which sent for the controller, who gave the order to the third floor, which got hold of the group, and the group had the good fortune to find Brailton at the end of a wire. Brailton would take whatever train he was told, and was waiting.
The Home Secretary meditated.
"I am going down by car now," he said. He looked at his watch. "It takes well under the hour by train—it's not seventeen miles. I shall be home by half past five, and I'll tell Marjorie. The best train is the six-thirty from St. Pancras. It gets down in forty minutes. I'll have him met and brought straight to Paulings. He'd be in time for dinner.... By the way," he added suddenly, as a thought struck him, "he'll be all right, will he? Go down?"
"Perfectly," said Morden eagerly. "Perfectly."
"No one'll suspect anything?" persisted his chief anxiously.
"Oh, no, no, no!" assured Morden airily. "I know the man like an uncle. Quiet, silver, rather too refined, silent, tall. Dresses—if anything—a little too carefully. At Lady Matcham's he passed for a Don working in Egypt who hadn't come to London for months. And in this last Yorkshire case he passed as a Times correspondent just back in England from the east after some years. All you have to do is to make up good reasons for people not having seen him before. He passes perfectly."
"The accent?" said the Home Secretary, knitting his brows again. "Is—well—you know what I mean?"
"Oh, perfectly. It's beautiful; it's remarkably smooth—yet not conspicuous," said Morden. Then, "You knew old Dickie Hafton?" he added suddenly.
"Of course I knew old Dickie Hafton!" answered the indignant Home Secretary. "He was my mother-in-law's first cousin—went to the Lords in 1895 and to the Lord in 1910. Fond o' women." And there rose before his mental eye the image of that aged peer, thin, aquiline, too proud, too careful of his dress, a man of exquisite voice a trifle thin in tone, but how precise! with the old, not uncharming habit of a few French words here and there. A public figure to the last, famous for his activities in the evangelical world.