Hillyard walked to the door, conscious that he looked the fool he felt himself to be.  But at the door he turned in a sort of exasperation.

“Can’t you tell me at all why Bendish’s friend wants my help?” he asked.

It was at this moment that the indifferent gentleman had the inspiration of his life.

“I haven’t an idea, Mr. Hillyard,” he replied.  “Perhaps he has got into difficulties in the writing of a revue.”

The answer certainly drove Hillyard from the room without another word.  He stood outside the door purple with heat and indignation.  Hillyard neither overrated nor decried his work.  But to be dragged away from the buffalo and the reed-buck of the Dinder River in order to be told that he was a writer of revues.  No!  That was carrying a bad joke too far.

Hillyard stalked haughtily along the corridor towards the outer door, but not so fast but that a youth passed him with a sheet of paper in his hand.  The youth went into the room where Government cablegrams were coded.  The sheet of paper which he held in his hand was inscribed with a message that Martin Hillyard would leave Alexandria in a week’s time on the s.s. Himalaya.  And the message strangely enough was not addressed to Paul Bendish at all.  It was headed, “For Commodore Graham.  Admiralty.”  The great Summons had in fact come, although Hillyard knew it not.

He travelled in consequence leisurely by sea.  He started from Alexandria after half the month of June had gone, and he was thus in the Bay of Biscay on that historic morning of June the twenty-eighth, when the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophia Duchess of Hohenberg, were murdered in the streets of Saravejo.  London, when he reached it, was a choir of a million voices not yet tuned to the ringing note of one.  It was incredible that the storm, foreseen so often over the port wine, should really be bursting at last.  Mediation will find a way.  Not this time; the moment has been chosen.  And what will England do?  Ride safe in the calm centre of the hurricane?  No ship ever did, and England won’t.

A few degenerate ones threw up their hands and cried that all was over—­they knew.

Of these a gaunt-visaged man, stubborn and stupid and two generations back a German, held forth in the hall of Hillyard’s club.

“German organisation, German thoroughness and German brains—­we are no match for them.  The country’s thick with spies—­wonderful men.  Where shall we find their equals?”

A sailor slipped across the hall and dropped into a chair by Hillyard’s side.

“You take no part in these discussions?  The crackling of thorns—­what?”

“I have been a long time away.”

“Thought so,” continued the sailor.  “A man was inquiring for you yesterday—­a man of the name of Graham.”

Hillyard shook his head.

“I don’t know him.”

“No, but he is a friend of a friend of yours.”