It was strange how, as I talked, each detail fell into its place, how each little circumstance, formerly so mystifying, grew clear.  The alarm of the maitre d’hotel over my sudden departure, his relief when I entered the booths, his corresponding horror when, emerging, I took the elevator for my room, puzzled me no longer.  The deserted halls, the flight of the little German intruder, the determined lack of interest of the hotel management, were merely links in the chain.

I told a straight, unvarnished story with one exception.  When I came to the point I couldn’t bring in Miss Esme Falconer’s name.  I said non-committally that a lady had occupied the room where the thief took refuge; and I left it to be inferred that I had never seen her before or since.

The lieutenant heard my tale out with impassivity.  “Is that all, Mr. Bayne?” he asked shortly, as I paused.

“Yes,” I lied doggedly.  “And if you want more, I call you insatiable.  I’ve told you enough to satisfy any man’s appetite for the abnormal, haven’t I?”

“Your defense, then,” he summed it up, “is that under the protection of a German management a German agent entered your room, opened your trunk, concealed these papers in it, and repacked it.  You believe that, eh?”

It sounded wild enough, I acknowledged gloomily as I sat staring at the carpet with my elbows on my knees.

“You’ve been a pretty fool, a pretty fool, a pretty fool!” the refrain sang itself unceasingly in my ears.  I was disgusted with the episode, more disgusted yet with my own role.  Why was I lying, why making myself by my present silence as well as by my former density the flagrant confederate of a clever spy?

I shrugged my shoulders.

“Oh, what’s the use?” I muttered.  “No, of course I don’t believe it, and you won’t either if you are sane.  It is too ridiculous.  I might as well suggest that if the thief hadn’t been gone when they arrived, the manager and the detective would have shanghaied me, or the house doctor drugged me with a hypodermic till the fellow could get away.  Let’s end all this!  I’m ready to go ashore if you want to take me.  In your place I know I should laugh at such a story; and I think that on general principles I should order the man who told it shot.”

“Not necessarily, Mr. Bayne,” was the cool response of the Englishman.  “The trouble with you neutrals is that you laugh too much at German spies.  We warn you sometimes, and then you grin and say that it’s hysteria.  But by and by you’ll change your minds, as we did, and know the German secret service for what it is—­the most competent thing, the most widely spread, and pretty much the most dangerous, that the world has to fight to-day.”

“You don’t mean,” I inquired blankly, “that you believe me?”

It looks odd enough as I set it down.  Ordinarily I expect my word to be accepted; but then, as a general thing I don’t suddenly discover that I have been chaperoning a set of German code-dispatches across the seas.