He made a point of finding Carew at his club three days later, when he turned the conversation to her. Hugh at once became enthusiastic. It was quite apparent that he was over head and ears in love with the pretty young French girl. He had, it seemed, first met her in Rouen during the war, and had again encountered her six months ago by pure accident while walking along Kensington High Street. To a man in love it is useless to give warning, and Falconer, realising this, hesitated to say anything to the girl’s detriment.
He had warned her in all seriousness that if she played a crooked game he would expose her. And he now recollected that the expression in her eyes when she had confessed her love for Hugh was one of true honesty and frankness.
Carew was, of course, in entire ignorance that his friend was acquainted with the girl whose beauty had cast a spell over him, and Geoffrey, on his part, remained silent.
His interview over a whisky-and-soda at the Wellington Club that afternoon proved that the pair were genuinely in love with each other. But Falconer, recollecting Gabrielle’s position, was wondering what could be behind it all. Hugh Carew was heir to a baronetcy, the elder son of a very wealthy man, and he wondered whether those mysterious international thieves behind Gabrielle were not scheming blackmail. Indeed, the future extortion of money seemed to be at the root of it all.
That night, after calling at Upper Brook Street for half an hour, Geoffrey went back to Warley full of grave apprehensions concerning his brother-officer, and, before turning in, he sat down to further test his improved amplifier by which signals from both low and high-power stations came in with almost double strength.
“Hitherto there have been three grades of amplifiers,” he muttered to himself, as he sat with the low-resistance telephones over his ears. “They have never yet invented an amplifying detector to cover all wave-lengths from three hundred to seventeen thousand. We constructed one which was equally effective on all commercial wave-lengths, but complications had to be introduced which rendered the instrument entirely unsuitable for ordinary practical use. Yet here I have, I hope, a device which increases the amplitude of the oscillations over all wave-lengths, both for ‘spark’ or ‘continuous waves.’”
He listened on the telephones to the usual traffic of the night. Many of the messages passing and re-passing across the Atlantic were in code—messages of mystery all of them. The rapidity of the exchange of communications by wireless—both private and commercial—has long out-distanced the old-fashioned cables, with their long delay and deliberate methods. Truly, the world is now beginning to realise that it can send messages across the seven seas and receive replies by wireless in half the time occupied by the submarine cables.
Geoffrey remained with the telephones over his ears for quite an hour, making delicate adjustments here and there, his new instrument being so sensitive that he could hear many amateurs in London working on their ten watts and one hundred and eighty mètres to which the General Post Office restricts them. Then he switched off and retired to bed.
Four days went by—strenuous days—for at Chelmsford important tests were being made upon the great high-power wireless telephone set with its huge panel with globular glass valves, each the size of a football—the set which the collective brains of the Marconi Company had devised in order to exchange actual speech with stations across the Atlantic. Geoffrey was one of the engineers engaged in these tests, hence he had little time for anything else. He snatched his lunch hastily each day in the comfortable upstairs dining-room of the heads of departments, and under the chief telephone engineer, whose clear, deliberate voice is known to all wireless men, devoted every moment to his particular sphere in the perfection of the new apparatus which was to supersede the dot-and-dash of Morse’s invention.
One evening, after leaving Chelmsford, he went on to London, and having dressed at the club, dined at Upper Brook Street. Mrs. Beverley was giving a small dance in honour of a French Minister of State and his wife, and Sylvia had pressed him to come. Hence he spent an enjoyable evening, in which the only jarring note was the presence of the ineffable Lord Hendlewycke, to whom, of course, Sylvia was forced to be polite.