“And to think,” Lady Conyers exclaimed “that we were half afraid to tell your father that Hugh was coming to dinner!”

Geraldine had slipped from the room.  The Admiral blew his nose.

“I hope Geraldine’s going to be sensible,” he said.  “I’ve always maintained that Thomson was a fine fellow, only Geraldine seemed rather carried away by that young Granet.  Poor fellow!  One can’t say anything about him now, but he was just the ordinary type of showy young soldier, not fit to hold a candle to a man like Thomson.”

Lady Conyers was a little startled.

“You have such sound judgement, Seymour,” she murmured.

Thomson was a few minutes late for dinner but even the Admiral forgave him.

“Just ourselves, Thomson,” he said, as they made their way into the dining-room.  “What a shock the Chief gave me to-day!  You’ve kept things pretty dark.  Inspector of Hospitals, indeed!”

Thomson smiled.

“That was my excuse,” he explained, “for running backwards and forwards between France and England at the beginning of the war.  There’s no particular secret about my position now.  I’ve had a very hard fight to keep it, a very hard fight to make it a useful one.  Until last night, at any rate, it hasn’t seemed to me that English people realised that we were at war.  Now, I hope at last that we are going to take the gloves off.  Do you know,” he went on, a little later, “that in France they think we’re mad.  Honestly, in my position, if I had had the French laws at my back I believe that by to-day the war would have been over.  As it is, when I started even my post was a farce.  We had to knuckle under the whole of the time, to the civil authorities.  They wanted to fine a spy ten shillings or to bind him over to keep the peace!  I’ve never had to fight for anything so hard in my life as I’ve had to fight once or twice for my file of men at the Tower.  At the beginning of the war we’d catch them absolutely red-handed.  All they had to do was to surrender to the civil authorities, and we had a city magistrate looking up statutes to see how to deal with them.”

“There are a good many things which will make strange reading after the war is over,” the Admiral said grimly.  “I fancy that my late department will provide a few sensations.  Still, our very mistakes are our justification.  We were about as ready for war as Lady Conyers there is to play Rugby football for Oxford.”

“It has taken us the best part of a year to realise what war means,” Thomson assented.  “Even now there are people whom one meets every day who seem to be living in abstractions.”

“Last night’s raid ought to wake a few of them up,” the Admiral grunted.  “I should like to have shown those devils where to have dropped a few of their little toys.  There are one or two men who were making laws not so long ago, who’d have had a hole in their roofs.”

Geraldine laughed softly.