Then, afraid that if he said more, he might say too much, he placed a chair for her and drew up one for himself.
“More than that,” he went on, “I am going to prove to you that your faith is not misplaced. Take my word for it, your father shall be restored to you within a very short time; before to-morrow morning, unless I am very much mistaken.”
Never yet, in their long acquaintance, had Grail failed to make good a promise to her, and his assurance now brought a sigh of genuine relief to her lips and a smile to her pale, anxious face.
“Ah!” she exclaimed. “You mean that the running down of these Japanese spies must result in disclosing father’s whereabouts?”
“Japanese spies!” His lips curled contemptuously. “They exist only in the imagination of Appleby and Hemingway.”
“Precisely what I thought, too, when the major told me,” she said. “I know, of course, that all the foreign nations keep secret agents hanging around our forts and army posts, just as we do around theirs; but that any of these men would go to such lengths struck me, on the face of it, as ridiculous.”
“There you are wrong,” Grail returned. “Ordinarily, I grant, you would be right; but the colonel’s present series of experiments being concerned with a new and surprising development in the use of the wireless in warfare, has stirred these fellows up to a pitch where they have been ready to dare almost anything. Besides, the chap who, I am convinced, engineered this deal——” He caught himself just as he was on the verge of revealing to her the point which had caused him most concern in the affair.
Dexterously he extricated himself from the situation by knocking a book from the desk with his elbow and stooping over to regain it.
“As I was about to say,” he resumed, “the chap who engineered this deal was not a Japanese, but of a nation which furnishes spies of an even more bold and subtle character.”
He drew from his pocket the half-smoked cigarette which formed his principal clew.