m a tug they sent to meet me to keep from putting her on the
mud.

"You may well believe that effectually put an end to my experiments with
'movable sky,' and other similar mechanical complexities," K----
continued with a laugh. "Indeed, from that time on I have been inclining
more and more to simpler things, rig outs that are sufficiently free
from wheels within wheels to leave the mind clear for the real work in
hand, which, after all, is putting down the Hun, not merely deceiving
him as to what you are. You see how simple a setting our present one is;
yet it is very complete in its way, and I have reasonable hopes of
success with it. No, I can hardly tell you just what I am driving at
with it, or just how I am going to go about it. In a month or two, when
its possibilities have been exhausted and it has become a wash-out
perhaps I shall be a bit freer to talk about it.

"Come and spend a day or two with me at the end of about six weeks, when
my present round of stunting will probably be over, and I'll tell you
all the 'Q' yarns that the law allows. The Hun is dead wise to the game
on principle, so there can't be any point in keeping mum any longer on
stunts that he's twigged a year or so ago, and which you'd have about as
much chance of taking him in with as you'd have in trying to sell a gold
brick on Broadway."

* * * * *

Three months went by before I was able to take advantage of K----'s
invitation to pay him a visit at what he had called his "business
headquarters," and as I had naturally expected that she would have
played many and diverse parts in the interim, it was with some surprise
that I found the "----" still "dressed" as she had been when I last saw
her.

"We've never quite been able to pull it off," K---- explained, "and the
waiting, and the not-quites and the might-have-beens have given me no
end of a dose of that kind of hope deferred which maketh the heart sick.
But we've at least been lucky enough not to queer the game by showing
our hand, so that there's still as good a chance as ever to make good
with it under favourable circumstances. For that reason, the less we say
about it for the present the better. That's in regard to this particular
stunt, I mean. As for the rest of the 'Q' stuff that we've brought off,
or tried to bring off, during the last three years--I'm at your service
to-night after dinner. The Germans have been publishing accounts of some
of the