“Of course!”

“Only yesterday,” Wyatt continued impressively, “she showed me a letter—­I read it, mind—­from a cousin of Prince Hohenlowe.  She met him at Monte Carlo this year, and they had a sort of flirtation.  In the postscript he says:  ’If you take my advice, don’t go to Dinard this August.  Don’t be further away from home than you can help at all this summer.’  What do you think that meant?”

“It sounds queer,” Hebblethwaite admitted.

“Germany is bound to have a knock at us,” Spencer Wyatt went on.  “We’ve talked of it so long that the words pass over our heads, as it were, but she means it.  And I tell you another thing.  She means to do it while there’s a Radical Government in power here, and before Russia finishes her reorganisation scheme.  I am not a soldier, Hebblethwaite, but the fellows we’ve got up at the top—­not the soldiers themselves but the chaps like old Busby and Simons—­are simply out and out rotters.  That’s plain speaking, isn’t it, but you and I are the two men concerned in the government of this country who do talk common sense to one another.  We’ve fine soldiers and fine organisers, but they’ve been given the go-by simply because they know their job and would insist upon doing it thoroughly, if at all.  Russia will have another four million men ready to be called up by the end of 1915, and not only that, but what is more important, is that she’ll have the arms and the uniforms for them.  Germany isn’t going to wait for that.  I’ve thought it all out.  We are going to get it in the neck before seven or eight months have passed, and if you want to know the truth, Hebblethwaite, that’s why I have taken a risk and ordered these ships.  The navy is my care, and it’s my job to see that we keep it up to the proper standard.  Whose votes rob me of my extra battleships?  Why, just a handful of Labour men and Irishmen and cocoa Liberals, who haven’t an Imperial idea in their brains, who think war belongs to the horrors of the past, and think they’re doing their duty by what they call ‘keeping down expenses.’  Hang it, Hebblethwaite, it’s worse than a man who won’t pay fire insurance for his house in a dangerous neighbourhood, so as to save a bit of money!  What I’ve done I stick to.  Split on me, if you want to.”

“I don’t think I shall do that,” Hebblethwaite said, “but honestly, Wyatt, I can’t follow you in your war talk.  We got over the Agadir trouble.  We’ve got over a much worse one—­the Balkan crisis.  There isn’t a single contentious question before us just now.  The sky is almost clear.”

“Believe me,” Wyatt insisted earnestly, “that’s just the time to look for the thunderbolt.  Can’t you see that when Germany goes to war, it will be a war of conquest, the war which she has planned for all these years?  She’ll choose her own time, and she’ll make a casus belli, right enough, when the time comes.  Of course, she’d have taken advantage of the position last year, but she simply wasn’t ready.  If you ask me, I believe she thinks herself now able to lick the whole of Europe.  I am not at all sure, thanks to Busby and our last fifteen years’ military administration, that she wouldn’t have a good chance of doing it.  Any way, I am not going to have my fleet cut down.”