“But you remember the name!” Fairbairn exclaimed eagerly.

“Yes, I do.”

“Well, what was it?”

It was again Fairbairn who spoke.  Hillyard had not moved, nor did he even look up.

“It was Mario Escobar,” said Jose Medina; and as he spoke he knew that the utterance of the name awakened no surprise in Martin Hillyard.  Hillyard filled his pipe from the tobacco tin, and lighted it before he spoke.

“Do you know anything of this Mario Escobar?” he asked, “you who know every one?”

Jose Medina shrugged his shoulders, and threw up his hands.

“There was some years ago a Mario Escobar at Alicante,” and Jose Medina saw Hillyard’s eyes open and fix themselves upon him with an unblinking steadiness.  Just so Jose Medina imagined might some savage animal in a jungle survey the man who had stumbled upon his lair.

“That Mario Escobar, a penniless, shameless person, was in business with a German, the German Vice-Consul.  He went from Alicante to London.”

“Thank you,” said Hillyard.  He rose from his chair and went to the window.  But he saw nothing of the deck outside, or the sea beyond.  He saw a man at a supper party in London a year before the war began, betraying himself by foolish insistent questions uttered in fear lest his close intimacy with Germans in Alicante should be known.

“I have no doubt that Mario Escobar came definitely to England, long before the war, to spy,” said Hillyard gravely.  He returned to the table, and took up again one of the empty glass tubes.

“I wonder what he was to do with these.”

Jose Medina had opened the door of the saloon once more.  A beam of sunlight shot through the doorway, and enveloped Hillyard’s arm and hand.  The tiny slim phial glittered like silver; and to all of them in the cabin it became a sinister engine of destruction.

“That, as you say, is your affair.  I must go,” said Jose, and he shook hands with Hillyard and Fairbairn, and went out on to the deck. “Hasta luego!”

“Hasta ahora!” returned Hillyard; and Jose Medina walked down the steps of the ladder to his felucca.  The blue sea widened between the two vessels; and in a week, Hillyard descended from a train on to the platform of the Quai D’Orsay station in Paris.  He had the tubes in his luggage, and one box of them he took that morning to Commandant Marnier at his office on the left bank of the river with the letter which gave warning of their arrival.

“You see what the letter says,” Hillyard explained.  “These tubes have been very successful in France.”

Marnier nodded his head: 

“If you will leave them with me, I will show them to our chemists, and perhaps, in a few days, I will have news for you.”

For a week Hillyard took his ease in Paris and was glad of the rest in the midst of those strenuous days.  He received one morning at his hotel, a batch of letters, many of which had been written months before.  But two were of recent date.  Henry Luttrell wrote to him: