nd clearly enough the glint of a white paper he was holding.
He made his circuit and re-entered the room.

Here I felt and conquered a relapse to scepticism. 'If this is an
important conclave why don't they set guards?' Answer, the only
possible one, 'Because they stand alone. Their _employes,_ like
_everyone_ we had met hitherto, know nothing. The real object of this
salvage company (a poor speculation, I opined) is solely to afford a
pretext for the conclave.' 'Why the curtain, even?' 'Because there
are maps, stupid!'

I was back again at the window, but as impotent as ever against that
even stream of low confidential talk. But I would not give up. Fate
and the fog had brought me here, the one solitary soul perhaps who by
the chain of circumstances had both the will and the opportunity to
wrest their secret from these four men.

The marlin-spike! Where the lower half of the window met the sill it
sank into a shallow groove. I thrust the point of the spike down into
the interstice between sash and frame and heaved with a slowly
increasing force, which I could regulate to the fraction of an ounce,
on this powerful lever. The sash gave, with the faintest possible
protest, and by imperceptible degrees I lifted it to the top of the
groove, and the least bit above it, say half an inch in all; but it
made an appreciable difference to the sounds within, as when you
remove your foot from a piano's soft pedal. I could do no more, for
there was no further fulcrum for the spike, and I dared not gamble
away what I had won by using my hands.

Hope sank again when I placed my cheek on the damp sill, and my ear
to the chink. My men were close round the table referring to papers
which I heard rustle. Dollmann's 'report' was evidently over, and I
rarely heard his voice; Grimm's occasionally, von Bruening's and
Boehme's frequently; but, as before, it was the latter only that I
could ever count on for an intelligible word. For, unfortunately, the
villains of the piece plotted without any regard to dramatic fitness
or to my interests. Immersed in a subject with which they were all
familiar, they were allusive, elliptic, and persistently technical.
Many of the words I did catch were unknown to me. The rest were, for
the most part, either letters of the alphabet or statistical figures,
of depth, distance, and, once or twice, of time. The letters of the
alphabet recurred often, and seemed, as far as I could make out, to
represent the ke