"I haven't any," said Julian. "I'm like the old lady in the earthquake who found herself in the street with no clothes on. She bowed gravely to a gentleman she had met the day before and said, 'I should be happy to give you my card, Mr. Jones, but I have lost the receptacle.' Things like that happen in earthquakes. I have lost my receptacle." He met Stella's eyes and took the consent of her laughter. He was as happy with her as a boy set loose from school.
Lady Verny, watching him, was almost frightened at his lack of self-restraint. "He has never trusted any one like this before," she thought. "He is keeping nothing back." It was like seeing the released waters of a frozen stream.
While they sat in the hall before Julian rejoined them, Lady Verny showed Stella all the photographs of Julian taken since he was a baby.
There was a singularly truculent one of him, at three years old, with a menacingly poised cricket-bat, which Stella liked best of all. Lady Verny had no copy of it, but she pressed Stella to take it.
"Julian will give you so many things," she said; "but I want to give you something that you will value, and which is quite my own." So Stella took the truculent baby, which was Lady Verny's own.
"You look very comfortable sitting there together; I won't disturb you for chess," Julian observed when he came in shortly afterward. "I was wondering if you would like to hear what I did in Germany. It's a year old now and as safe with you as with me, but it mustn't go any further."
Julian told his story very quietly, leaning back against the cushions of a couch by the open window. Above his head, Stella could see the dark shapes of the black yew hedges and the wheeling of the bats as they scurried to and fro upon their secret errands.
Neither Lady Verny nor Stella moved until Julian had finished speaking. It was the most thrilling of detective stories; but it is not often that the roots of our being are involved in detective stories.
They could not believe that he lay there before them, tranquilly smoking a cigarette and breathed on by the soft June air. As they watched his face comfort and security vanished. They were in a ruthless world where a false step meant death. Julian had been in danger, but it was never the danger which he had been in that he described; it was the work he had set out to do and the way he had done it. He noticed danger only when it obstructed him. Then he put his wits to meet it. They were, as Stella realized, very exceptional wits for meeting things. Julian combined imagination with strict adherence to fact. He had the courage which never broods over an essential risk and the caution which avoids all unnecessary ones.
"Of course," he broke off for a moment, "you felt all the time rather like a flea under a microscope. Don't underrate the Germans. As a microscope there's nothing to beat them; where the microscope leaves off is where their miscalculations begin. A microscope can tell everything about a flea except where it is going to hop.