and a concierge in a big hotel at St Moritz.  His most important discovery was that there was a second cipher in the return messages sent from Switzerland, different from the one that the Gussiter lot used in England.  He got this cipher, but though he could read it he couldn’t make anything out of it.  He concluded that it was a very secret means of communication between the inner circle of the Wild Birds, and that Ivery must be at the back of it . . .  But he was still a long way from finding out anything that mattered.

Then the whole situation changed, for Mary got in touch with Ivery.  I must say she behaved like a shameless minx, for she kept on writing to him to an address he had once given her in Paris, and suddenly she got an answer.  She was in Paris herself, helping to run one of the railway canteens, and staying with her French cousins, the de Mezieres.  One day he came to see her.  That showed the boldness of the man, and his cleverness, for the whole secret police of France were after him and they never got within sight or sound.  Yet here he was coming openly in the afternoon to have tea with an English girl.  It showed another thing, which made me blaspheme.  A man so resolute and single-hearted in his job must have been pretty badly in love to take a risk like that.

He came, and he called himself the Capitaine Bommaerts, with a transport job on the staff of the French G.Q.G.  He was on the staff right enough too.  Mary said that when she heard that name she nearly fell down.  He was quite frank with her, and she with him.  They are both peacemakers, ready to break the laws of any land for the sake of a great ideal.  Goodness knows what stuff they talked together.  Mary said she would blush to think of it till her dying day, and I gathered that on her side it was a mixture of Launcelot Wake at his most pedantic and schoolgirl silliness.

He came again, and they met often, unbeknown to the decorous Madame de Mezieres.  They walked together in the Bois de Boulogne, and once, with a beating heart, she motored with him to Auteuil for luncheon.  He spoke of his house in Picardy, and there were moments, I gathered, when he became the declared lover, to be rebuffed with a hoydenish shyness.  Presently the pace became too hot, and after some anguished arguments with Bullivant on the long-distance telephone she went off to Douvecourt to Lady Manorwater’s hospital.  She went there to escape from him, but mainly, I think, to have a look—­trembling in every limb, mind you—­at the Chateau of Eaucourt Sainte-Anne.

I had only to think of Mary to know just what Joan of Arc was.  No man ever born could have done that kind of thing.  It wasn’t recklessness.  It was sheer calculating courage.

Then Blenkiron took up the tale.  The newspaper we found that Christmas Eve in the Chateau was of tremendous importance, for Bommaerts had pricked out in the advertisement the very special second cipher of the Wild Birds.  That proved that Ivery was at the back of the Swiss business.  But Blenkiron made doubly sure.