“Do you know that mood when one could scream because a mat is crooked?” he said to March, as they walked up and down in the back garden below the line of dingy statues.  “Women get into it when they’ve worked too hard; and I’ve been working pretty hard lately, of course.  It drives me mad when Herries will wear his hat a little crooked—­habit of looking like a gay dog.  Sometime I swear I’ll knock it off.  That statue of Britannia over there isn’t quite straight; it sticks forward a bit as if the lady were going to topple over.  The damned thing is that it doesn’t topple over and be done with it.  See, it’s clamped with an iron prop.  Don’t be surprised if I get up in the middle of the night to hike it down.”

They paced the path for a few moments in silence and then he continued.  “It’s odd those little things seem specially big when there are bigger things to worry about.  We’d better go in and do some work.”

Horne Fisher evidently allowed for all the neurotic possibilities of Archer and the dissipated habits of Herries; and whatever his faith in their present firmness, did not unduly tax their time and attention, even in the case of the Prime Minister.  He had got the consent of the latter finally to the committing of the important documents, with the orders to the Western armies, to the care of a less conspicuous and more solid person—­an uncle of his named Horne Hewitt, a rather colorless country squire who had been a good soldier, and was the military adviser of the committee.  He was charged with expediting the government pledge, along with the concerted military plans, to the half-mutinous command in the west; and the still more urgent task of seeing that it did not fall into the hands of the enemy, who might appear at any moment from the east.  Over and above this military official, the only other person present was a police official, a certain Doctor Prince, originally a police surgeon and now a distinguished detective, sent to be a bodyguard to the group.  He was a square-faced man with big spectacles and a grimace that expressed the intention of keeping his mouth shut.  Nobody else shared their captivity except the hotel proprietor, a crusty Kentish man with a crab-apple face, one or two of his servants, and another servant privately attached to Lord James Herries.  He was a young Scotchman named Campbell, who looked much more distinguished than his bilious-looking master, having chestnut hair and a long saturnine face with large but fine features.  He was probably the one really efficient person in the house.

After about four days of the informal council, March had come to feel a sort of grotesque sublimity about these dubious figures, defiant in the twilight of danger, as if they were hunchbacks and cripples left alone to defend a town.  All were working hard; and he himself looked up from writing a page of memoranda in a private room to see Horne Fisher standing in the doorway, accoutered as if for travel.  He fancied that Fisher looked a little pale; and after a moment that gentleman shut the door behind him and said, quietly: