"And does it strike you"—there was infinite sagacity in the clear brown eyes behind the gold-rimmed glasses, "that if you had been chatting freely with a supposed equal, about your own position, prospects, and opinions, you would have 'dropped him like a hot potato' if you had suspected him of being commissioned to sound you for French sympathies, predilections, and so forth—on the eve of hostilities with France?"
A light broke in upon the darkness in which Carolan had groped. His eyes became circular, and his mouth shaped for a whistle. He exploded:
"Oh, hang it! I never thought of anything so—so beastly.... I wondered why Valverden shied, supposing me a Secret Information agent, when the Army has shoals of 'em.... But that Government should set such fellows sniffing at the heels of the Army—of course I never thought of that. It's not—cricket, is it, sir?"
The Doctor's hearty laugh pulled round the heads of a breakfasting party of officers not far off. He said, lowering his voice:
"You remember the nigger's definitions of verse and prose, don't you? 'Go up mill-dam, fall down slam! dat verse. Go up mill-dam, fall down whoppo, dat blank verse.' Prussian military authority may hold, that between spying on the enemy before the Army and spying on the Army before the enemy, there is as little distinction. Though they'd think differently at the Horse Guards, thank the Lord! By the way, with regard to that gaunt, long-legged Lieutenant-Colonel of Uhlans of the Landwehr who claimed to know something of you, rather luckily for your ambitions!—where did you come across him? 'An English schoolboy,' he called you, 'crazy to see War!'"
P. C. Breagh explained:
"He did know something of me, sir!—though it was the merest chance—our meeting. Until a week ago he was a teacher of English at the Berners Street Institute of Languages, and lodged at my landlady's. And they recalled him to Berlin a few hours before the Declaration of War."
XXXV
It was the Doctor's turn to whistle.