He counted the rays of the sun. There were three long ones and two short ones.
"I suppose there are three or four battalions garrisoned there," he remarked.
"Three, I think. And a company of engineers and one company of Alpine chasseurs."
All the time, with a detached air, the young Englishman was examining the colored poster, searching it minutely for variations from other posters of the same sort which he had recently investigated.
There remained in his mind little or no doubt that the number and position of the groups of pointed wavelets signified something important; that the number of sails set on the ships, which varied in every poster, contained further information; that the sky, cloudless in some posters, dotted with clouds in others, was destined to convey topographical particulars to somebody.
These colored advertisements of a soap made in Cologne by Bauermann and Company, and plastered over the landscape of Northern and Eastern Belgium and France, concealed a wealth of secret information for anybody who possessed the key to the messages so clearly and craftily expressed in pictograph and cipher code.
The sinister significance of the sheet in his hand was becoming more apparent every minute. He had made a study of these posters—was just beginning to find them interesting, when he had been ordered to America. Now, all his interest in them returned.
Sister Eila had seated herself at her desk, and, while he was still examining the poster, she continued serenely to correct the pile of inky copybooks.
He watched her for a while, where she bent above the scrawled pages, her pen poised, her lovely face framed in the snowy wimple under the pale shadow of her wide-winged coiffe.
"Sister Eila?"