Von Rosius's long legs had carried him to the first-floor before Mr. Knewbit had done rubbing his ear and thinking. When his sitting-room door had banged, and the kitchen gaselier ceased to vibrate at the concussion, the little man said, looking at Carolan:
"You have an eye in your head, young chap, and have lived in that gentleman's country, and speak his language. And yet the setting of his upper lip and the blank expression he throwed into his spectacles when I put a plain question to him, have told me more about him than you've learned. I'll bet you a ginger-ale that Germany is his mother, and he has been recalled to serve in the Reserve Force, I forget what they call it just now."
"They call the Reserve the Reserve, but I expect you mean the Landwehr," returned Carolan, wondering at the little man's sharpness.
"That's it. Listen to him singing," said Mr. Knewbit, as the first-floor sitting-room door banged open again, heavy steps crossed the landing, and the robust baritone of Herr von Rosius trolled forth a fragment of song: "Now, if that might be anything in the 'Rule Britannia' line, my ginger-ale's as good as won."
"It's the Wacht am Rhein," said P. C. Breagh, returning enlightened from an excursion to the bottom of the kitchen staircase, "and I believe you've hit the nail on the head."
"He served in '66 he told me," said Mr. Knewbit, indicating the unseen Von Rosius with an upward jerk of his chin, "and now he's got to go back and be a cog or a screw-nut somewhere in the big war-machine you've told me of. What did he call Service of the Active kind? 'Camping under the helmet-spike.' We shall miss him, for a quieter and civiler lodger never wore out oilcloth. Hark!—that was the hall-door. Monsieur Meguet's back uncommon early. As a rule, after the Museum Print Room closes he goes to his club in Leicester Square."
The French gentleman who lived on the second floor had ascended the doorsteps simultaneously with Mr. Ticking. Mounting to the hall on his way upstairs, attended by the ginger Tom—no longer a kitten—P. C. Breagh found them, surrounded by a blue haze of Sweet Caporal and Navy Cut, finishing a political discussion on the mat, while Mr. Mounteney, languidly leaning against the door-post of the ground-floor front-parlor, listened with a detached and weary air.
"C'est de bouc émissaire—I tell you he is the scapegoat of a diplomat's malice!" declared the French gentleman. "Of himself he is without designs—unambitious! a good child, nothing more! Brave as he is—has he not been trained from infancy to hardihood and acts of daring?—has he not slept with but a blanket for covering, and eaten the soldier's sausage of pea? ... Brave as he is, he dare not draw upon his unhappy country the terrible—the devastating—the exterminating wrath of France!"
The French gentleman whose profession was Prints had spoken loudly,—possibly without the design of being heard upon the first floor.
Now, as he paused to wipe his streaming brow with a brilliant green silk handkerchief, a door upon the landing immediately above was suddenly thrown open, and as a trunk was dragged across the landing, a stave of the German equivalent to "Rule, Britannia," boomed forth in Herr von Rosius's powerful baritone: