“Words!  Major Grim.  Words!” sneered Eisernstein, getting up to go.  “What do words amount to, when presently throats are to be cut?  If your throat were in danger, I venture to say there would be something doing, instead of mere talk about precautions!  I hope you will enjoy your little cigarette,” he added bitterly.  “Good morning!”

“Talk of fiddling while Rome burns!” Grim laughed as soon as the Zionist had left the room.  “Has it ever occurred to you that Nero was possibly smothering his feelings?  I wonder how long there’d be one Zionist left out here, if we simply stood aside and looked on.  Go and change your clothes, Suliman.  It’s time I broke a leg.”

Grim disappeared upstairs himself, and returned about ten minutes later in the uniform of a Shereefian officer—­that is to say, of Emir Feisul’s Syrian army.  Nothing could be smarter, not anything better calculated to disguise a man.  Disguise, as any actor or detective can tell you, is not so much a matter of make-up as suggestion.  It is little mannerisms—­unstudied habits that identify.  The suggestion that you are some one else is the thing to strive for, not the concealment of who you really are.

Grim’s skin had been sun-tanned in the Arab campaign under Lawrence against the Turks.  The Shereefian helmet is a compromise between the East and West, having a strip of cloth hanging down behind it as far as the shoulders and covering the ears on either side, to take the place of the Arab head-dress.  The khaki uniform had just enough of Oriental touch about it to distinguish it from that of a British officer.  No man inexperienced in disguise would dream of choosing it; for the simple reason that it would not seem to him disguise enough.  Yet Grim now looked so exactly like somebody else that it was hard to believe he was the same man who had been in the room ten minutes before.  His mimicry of the Syrian military walk—­blended of pride and desire not to seem proud—­was perfect.

“I’m now staff-captain Ali Mirza of Feisul’s army,” he announced.  “Ali Mirza a man notorious for his anti-British rancor, but supposed to be down here just now on a diplomatic mission.  I’ve been seen about the streets like this for the last two days.  But say:  that doctor is a long time on the way.”

He went to the telephone, but did not call the hospital; that would have been too direct and possibly too secret.

“Give me Headquarters—­yes—­who’s that?—­never mind who’s speaking—­say:  I can’t get the military hospital—­something wrong with the wire—­will you call Major Templeton and say that Major Grim has had an accident—­yes, Grim—­compound fracture of the thigh—­very serious—­ask him to go at once to Major Grim’s quarters—­thanks—­that’s all.”  He returned to the fireplace and stood watching me meditatively for several minutes.

“If you deceive Templeton, you’ll do,” he said at last.  “Wait a minute.”