ould be. "Apportez moi a le
consuelo Britannique, s'il vous plait," he would say, for he was by
no means ignorant of French. In the meanwhile, he found the intimate
aspects of Mr. Butteridge an interesting study.

There were letters of an entirely private character addressed to Mr.
Butteridge, and among others several love-letters of a devouring sort
in a large feminine hand. These are no business of ours, and one remarks
with regret that Bert read them.

When he had read them he remarked, "Gollys!" in an awestricken tone, and
then, after a long interval, "I wonder if that was her?

"Lord!"

He mused for a time.

He resumed his exploration of the Butteridge interior. It included
a number of press cuttings of interviews and also several letters
in German, then some in the same German handwriting, but in English.
"Hul-LO!" said Bert.

One of the latter, the first he took, began with an apology to
Butteridge for not writing to him in English before, and for the
inconvenience and delay that had been caused him by that, and went on
to matter that Bert found exciting in, the highest degree. "We can
understand entirely the difficulties of your position, and that you
shall possibly be watched at the present juncture.--But, sir, we do not
believe that any serious obstacles will be put in your way if you wished
to endeavour to leave the country and come to us with your plans by the
customary routes--either via Dover, Ostend, Boulogne, or Dieppe. We
find it difficult to think you are right in supposing yourself to be in
danger of murder for your invaluable invention."

"Funny!" said Bert, and meditated.

Then he went through the other letters.

"They seem to want him to come," said Bert, "but they don't seem hurting
themselves to get 'im. Or else they're shamming don't care to get his
prices down.

"They don't quite seem to be the gov'ment," he reflected, after an
interval. "It's more like some firm's paper. All this printed stuff at
the top. Drachenflieger. Drachenballons. Ballonstoffe. Kugelballons.
Greek to me.

"But he was trying to sell his blessed secret abroad. That's all right.
No Greek about that! Gollys! Here IS the secret!"

He tumbled off the seat, opened the locker, and had the portfolio open
before him on the folding-table. It was full of drawings done in the
peculiar flat style and conventional colours engineers adopt. And, in,
addition there were some rather under-exposed photographs, obviously
don