“There are three women on the grounds,” said Bouchard.  “I have been against their staying from the first.  I——.”

He got no further.  His words were drowned by the outburst of one of the younger members of the staff, who had either to laugh or choke at the picture of this deep-eyed, spectral sort of man, known as a woman-hater, in his revelation of the farcical source of his suspicions.

“Why not include Clarissa Eileen?” some one asked, Starting a chorus of satirical exclamations.

“How do they get through the line?”

“Yes, past a wall of bayonets?”

“When not even a soldier in uniform is allowed to move away from his command without a pass?”

“By wireless?”

“Perhaps by telepathy!”

“Unless,” said the chief of the aerostatic division, grinning, “Bouchard lends them the use of our own wires through the capital and around by the neutral countries across the Brown frontier!”

“But the correct plans and location of their forts and the numbers of their heavy guns and of their planes and dirigibles—­your failure to have this information is not the result of any leak from our staff since the war began,” said Turcas in his dry, penetrating voice, clearing the air of the smoke of scattered explosions.

All were staring at Bouchard again.  What answer had he to this?  He was in the box, the evidence stated by the prosecutor.  Let him speak!

He was fairly beside himself in a paroxysm of rage and struck at the air with his clenched fist.

“——­ ——­ Lanstron!” he cried.

“There’s no purpose in that.  He can’t hear you!” said Turcas, dryly as ever.

“He might, through the leak,” said the chief aerostatic officer, who considered that many of his gallant subordinates had lost their lives through Bouchard’s inefficiency.  “Perhaps Clarissa Eileen has already telepathically wigwagged it to him.”

To lose your temper at a staff council is most unbecoming.  Turcas would have kept his if hit in the back by a fool automobilist.  Westerling had now recovered his.  He was again the superman in command.

“It is for you and not for us to locate the leak; yes, for you!” he said.  “That is all on the subject for the present,” he added in a tone of mixed pity and contempt, which left Bouchard freed from the stare of his colleagues and in the miserable company of his humiliation.

All on the subject for the present!  When it was taken up again his successor would be in charge.  He, the indefatigable, the over-intense, with his mediaeval partisan fervor, who loathed in secret machines like Turcas, was the first man of the staff to go for incompetency.

“And Engadir is the key-point,” Westerling was saying.

“Yes,” agreed Turcas.

“So we concentrate to break through there,” Westerling continued, “while we engage the whole line fiercely enough to make the enemy uncertain where the crucial attack is to be made.”