“Well, I was becoming hungry up on that fir-clad battlement.  I didn’t know how to get down into the valley.  It began to look as though I’d have to turn back; and that seemed a rather awful prospect.

“Anyway, what happened, eventually, was this:  I started east through the forest along that pathless tableland, and on the afternoon of the next day, tired out and almost starved, I stepped across the Swiss boundary line—­a wide, rocky, cleared space crossing a mountain flank like a giant’s road.

“No guards were visible anywhere, no sentry-boxes, but, as I stood hesitating in the middle of the frontier—­and just why I hesitated I don’t know—­I saw half a dozen jagers of a German mounted regiment ride up on the German side of the boundary.

“For a second the idea occurred to me that they had ridden parallel to the ledge to intercept me; but the idea seemed absurd, granted even that they had seen me upon the ledge from below, which I never dreamed they had.  So when they made me friendly gestures to come across the frontier I returned their cheery ‘Gruss Gott!’ and plodded thankfully across. ...  And their leader, leaning from his saddle to take my offered hand, suddenly struck me in the face, and at the same moment a trooper behind me hit me on the head with the butt of a pistol.”

The girl’s flying pencil faltered; she lifted her brown eyes, waiting.

“That’s about all,” he said—­“as far as facts are concerned....  They treated me rather badly....  I faced their firing-squads half-a-dozen times.  After that bluff wouldn’t work they interned me as an English civilian at Holzminden....  They hid me when, at last, an inspection took place.  No chance for me to communicate with our Ambassador or with any of the Commission.”

He turned to her in his boyish, frank way:  “But do you know, Miss Erith, it took me quite a while to analyse the affair and to figure out why they arrested me, lied about me, and treated me so hellishly.

“You see, I was kept in solitary confinement and never had a chance to speak to any of the other civilians interned there at Holzminden.  There was no way of suspecting why all this was happening to me except by the attitude of the Huns themselves and their endless questions and threats and cruelties.  They were cruel.  They hurt me a lot.”

Miss Erith’s eyes suddenly dimmed as she watched him, and she hastily bent her head over the pad.

“Well,” he went on, “the rest, as I say, is pure surmise.  This is my conclusion:  I think that for the last forty years the Huns have been busy with an astounding military enterprise.  Of course, since 1870, the Boche has expected war, and has been feverishly preparing for it.  All the world now knows what they have done—­not everything that they have done, however.

“My conclusion is this:  that, when Mount Terrible shrugged me off its northern flank, the snow slide carried me to an almost inaccessible spot of which even the Swiss hunters knew nothing.  Or, if they did, they considered it impossible to reach from their own territory.