She regained her self-control with a great effort, still holding to Baltazar. “You hound!” she whispered.
Baltazar, smitten with the realization that comedy had vanished—the comedy in which he had played so debonair and masterly a part—vanished in the flash of a cinematographic film, and that something very near tragedy was staring him in the face, stretched out his hand for the papers.
“Let me see.”
But Donnithorpe smiled his thin, derisive smile. “No. They’re too precious. I’ll hold them for you to look at. Keep away.”
And there, in the airless glass-roofed railway station, on that hot summer afternoon, in the midst of the reverberating noises of trains letting off steam, of a thousand human voices, of scurrying feet, of grating luggage trunks, in the midst of a small town’s moving and lounging population, surging now, at that hour’s height of the suburban traffic with home-going streams; there, with hundreds of eyes to watch them, hundreds of ears to hear them, hundreds of successive ears of people darting bee-like around the busy bookstall not ten yards away, there three quietly talking human beings stood at grips with destiny.
“This is written on your notepaper. It is a War Office secret. It reveals the whole strategy of the High Command.”
Baltazar’s lips grew grim and his eyes bent on the little man burned like fires. In Donnithorpe’s hands the document was Godfrey’s death warrant.
Then Baltazar remembered the shock he had received in Sheepshanks’s room at Cambridge when first he saw a letter of Godfrey’s, and Godfrey’s after explanation of the identity of their handwriting.
“Don’t you see? It gives the whole thing away,” Donnithorpe continued.
“I’m quite aware of it,” said Baltazar. “I drew it up for your wife.”