"So! That's the woman!" And a surge of scalding shame and bitter resentment rose in the heart of Patrine Saxham and filled it to the brim.
She could not have explained why she felt certain that her shameful secret was known to the man with the powerful eyes, the cast of whose face with its pointed beard faintly reminded one of the King and the Tsar.
Patrine had always abominated cheap sentiment. She had once laughed until she cried at a revival of an old four-decker drama, whose hero, waking to the knowledge of a committed, irrevocable deed cried in throaty, stagy tones of anguish upon God to put back the dreadful clock of Time and give him yesterday.
Now she perceived the deep, vital interest of the common-place human story. If asking Him on whom that other sinner cried would wipe from Time's register a span of hours between twelve P.M. and three o'clock in the morning—blot one deed from the Roll of things that done, are beyond Humanity's undoing—Patrine told herself that it would be worth while to wear sackcloth, live on boiled field-peas, drink brook-water, and pray—until her knees were worn to the bone.
She caught Saxham's piercing glance across the intervening strip of greensward. He turned away his eyes, and a shudder went through her frame. Had he suspected—could anyone have found out and told him? The Doctor's head was bent now as the General talked to him. It seemed to her that a muscle in his lean cheek twitched, a characteristic sign with him of excitement, or emotion. She wondered what the General had said to Uncle Owen to make him look like that.
As a fact, the quiet voice was saying in Saxham's ear: "And prepare against a surprise, Doctor—for though your nerves are tough as aluminium bronze, a few million gallons of water have rolled under the Thames bridges since you and I held Council of War.... As I mentioned before, the interest taken by the French Government in Sherbrand's gyroscopic hoverer may well have stimulated the interest of our Teuton neighbours. But it doesn't explain the presence on Fanshaw's Flying Ground of Lieutenant-General Count Helmuth von Moltke, Chief of the German Great General Staff, and—Grand Admiral Prince Henry of Prussia, brother of the Kaiser—in a F.I.A.T. touring-car!"
CHAPTER XXIX
A SECRET MISSION
"Can it be possible——" Saxham checked himself. "You see how rusty I am getting, General. You refer to that machine that turned out from where cars are parked just now. The German fellow went up to it.... It had a groom beside the chauffeur and three other men inside it.... While I was looking—elsewhere—it must have moved away!"
"It has only turned the corner of the café-restaurant," the Chief said in his quiet tones. He glanced in the direction of the squat block of gaily painted wooden buildings devoted to the inner needs of Fanshaw's clients. "The awning hides it, but I can see a bit of it still. Until it moves, I can go on talking. Frankly, I am in the position of the High Church curate who went out wild-pig shooting in the territories of the Limpopo with a single-bore hammer-gun of grandpapa's pattern—and got his choice of pot-shots between a lion and a rhino. Prinz Heinrich is my royal lion and von Herrnung,—who counted for little more than a bush-pig—has suddenly swelled into a rhinoceros."