“It’s better for a few people to be arrested by mistake than to let a spy keep on spying, isn’t it?”

“I suppose so, but we don’t want to be like the shepherd’s boy who used to try to frighten people by calling ‘Wolf!  Wolf!’ when there wasn’t any wolf.  You know what happened to him.  When a wolf really did come no one believed him.  Wo want to look before we leap.”

“I suppose you’re right, Harry.  Oh, I do hope we can really be of some use!  If I can’t go to the war, I’d like to think I’d had something to do —­ that I’d helped when my country needed me!”

“If you feel like that you’ll be able to help, all right,” said Harry.  “I feel that way, too not that I want to fight.  I wouldn’t want to do that for any country but my own.  But I would like to be able to know that I’d had something to do with all that’s going to be done.”

“I think it’s fine for you to be like that,” said Dick.  “I think there isn’t so much difference between us, after all, even if you are American and I’m English.  Well, here we are again.  I’ll see you in the morning, I suppose?”

“Right oh!  I’ll come around for you early.  Goodnight!”

“Goodnight!”

Neither of them really doubted for a moment that war was coming.  It was in the air.  The attack on the little shop that they had helped to avert was only one of many, although there was no real rioting in London.  Such scenes were simply the result of excitement, and no great harm was done anywhere.  But the tension of which such attacks were the result was everywhere.  For the next three days there was very little for anyone to do.

Everyone was waiting.  France and Germany were at war; the news came that the Germans had invaded Luxembourg, and were crossing the Belgian border.

And then, on Tuesday night, came the final news.  England had declared war.  For the moment the news seemed to stun everyone.  It had been expected, and still it came as a surprise.  But then London rose to the occasion.  There was no hysterical cheering and shouting; everything was quiet.  Harry Fleming saw a wonderful sight a whole people aroused and determined.  There was no foolish boasting; no one talked of a British general eating his Christmas dinner in Berlin.  But even Dick Mercer, excitable and erratic as he had always been, seemed to have undergone a great change.

“My father’s going to the war,” he told Harry on Wednesday morning.  He spoke very seriously.  “He was a captain in the Boer War, you know, so he knows something about soldiering.  He thinks he’ll be taken, though he’s a little older than most of the men who’ll go.  He’ll be an officer, of course.  And he says I’ve got to look after the mater when he’s gone.”

“You can do it, too,” said Harry, surprised, despite himself, by the change in his chum’s manner.  “You seem older than I now, Dick, and I’ve always thought you were a kid!”