me
in ignorance of his projects. I shall laugh at him; all our people
here will laugh. I shall be revenged. _Conspuez_ Dawson!"

"Don't be too hard on Dawson," urged Rust. "Madame Gilbert thinks a
lot of him, and would be pained if he suffered discredit through any
fault of hers."

"Fault!" shouted the gallant Froissart. "_La belle Madame_ is _sans
faute_, peerless, a prodigy of skill and discretion! She is superb. If
she implores me to spare the man Dawson, then I will consent, though
my heart is rent in fragments. As for you, _mon ami_, I fear that in
her hands you were not a figure of admiration. She twisted you about
her pretty fingers like a skein of wool. I do not think that you are,
what you call, cut out for the Secret Service."

"That is quite my own opinion," assented he gloomily.

PART III

_TO SEE IS TO BELIEVE_

CHAPTER XII

DAWSON PRESCRIBES

The mind of Dawson has the queerest limitations. He is entirely free
from any sense of proportion. If I wrote of those incidents which he
pressed upon me, this book would be intolerably dull. He sees no
interest in any episode which is not Dawson, Dawson, all the time. The
emotion which was aroused in the hearts of Cary and myself by
Trehayne's letter caused Dawson no small anxiety. He feared lest in
rendering this episode I should turn the limelight upon Trehayne and
leave the private of Marines in the shadows. Which is precisely what I
have done. From his "sick bed" he sent me a letter explaining that his
own honourable weakness of sympathy with an enemy spy was physical,
not moral--reprehensible failing induced by lack of sleep. He laboured
to convince me that the spirit of Dawson in the full flush of health
was of a frightfulness wholly Prussian in its logical completeness.
But I smiled, went my own way, and Dawson, when he comes to read this
book, can swear as loudly as he pleases.

If I had depended only upon Dawson, I should never have secured the
details of the story which I am about to write. It was Froissart who
first put me upon the track of it during one of those visits which I
paid to him when I was investigating _l'affaire_ Rust. Froissart, in
imaginative insight, is as much superior to Dawson as the average
Frenchman is to the average Englishman. But in execution he admits
sorrowfully that he cannot hold a candle to his brutal secretive
English chief. "I have genius," exclaimed Froissart, "of which the
sacred dog Dawson h