Like most of the quarters occupied by British officers, the house occupied by Major Roger Ticknor and his wife Mabel was “enemy property,” and its only virtue consisted in its being rent free.  Grim, Jeremy, little Ticknor and his smaller wife, and I sat facing across a small deal table with a stuttering oil-lamp between us.  In a house not far away some Orthodox Jews, arrayed in purple and green and orange, with fox-fur around the edges of their hats, were drunk and celebrating noisily the Feast of Esther; so you can work out the exact date if you’re curious enough.  The time was nine p.m.  We had talked the Anzac hurricane-drive through Palestine all over again from the beginning, taking world-known names in vain and doing honour to others that will stay unsung for lack of recognition, when one of those unaccountable pauses came, and for the sake of breaking silence, Mabel Ticknor asked a question.  She was a little, plucky, pale-faced thing whom you called instinctively by her first name at the end of half an hour—­a sort of little mother of loose-ended men, who can make silk purses out of sows’ ears, and wouldn’t know how to brag if she were tempted.

“Say, Jim,” she asked, turning her head quickly like a bird toward Grim on my left, “what’s your verdict about that man from Syria that Roger took in a cab to the Sikh hospital?  I’m out a new pair of riding breeches if Roger has to pay the bill for him.  I want my money’s worth.  Tell me his story.”

“Go ahead and buy the breeches, Mabel.  I’ll settle that bill,” he answered.

“No, you won’t, Jim!  You’re always squandering money.  Half your pay goes to the scallywags you’ve landed in jail.  This one’s up to Roger and me; we found him.”

Grim laughed.

“I can charge his keep under the head of ‘information paid for.’  I shall sign the voucher without a qualm.”

“You’d get blood out of a stone, Jim!  Go on, tell us!”

“I’m hired to keep secrets as well as discover them,” Grim answered, smiling broadly.

“Of course you are,” she retorted.  “But I know all Roger’s secrets, and he’s a doctor, mind you!  Am I right, Roger?  Come along!  There are no servants—­no eavesdroppers.  Wait.  I’ll put tea on the table, and then we’ll all listen.”

She made tea Australian fashion in a billy, which is quick and simple, but causes alleged dyspepsia cures to sell well all the way from Adelaide to the Gulf of Carpentraia.

“You’ll have to tell her, Jim,” said Jeremy.

“Mabel’s safe as an iron roof,” put in her husband.  “Noisy in the rain, but doesn’t leak.”

But neither man nor woman could have extracted a story from James Schuyler Grim unless it suited him to tell it.  Mabel Ticknor is one of those honest little women who carry men’s secrets with them up and down the world.  Being confided in by nearly every man who met her was a habit.  But Grim tells only when the telling may accomplish something, and I wondered, as he laid his elbow on the table to begin, just what use he meant to make of Mabel Ticknor.  He uses what he knows as other level-headed men use coin, spending thriftily for fair advantage.