eenly.

"Well, what do you make of it?" he asked the detective. "Wheat at a
shilling a pound already. God knows what it's going to be to-morrow!"

"Any other news?" asked Beale.

"We have asked Germany to explain why she has prohibited the export of
wheat and to give us a reason for the stocks she holds and the steps she
has taken during the past two months to accumulate reserves."

"An ultimatum?"

"Not exactly an ultimatum. There's nothing to go to war about. The
Government has mobilized the fleet and the French Government has
partially mobilized her army. The question is," he said, "would war ease
the situation?"

Beale shook his head.

"The battle will not be fought in the field," he said, "it will be
fought right here in London, in all your great towns, in Manchester,
Coventry, Birmingham, Cardiff. It will be fought in New York and in a
thousand townships between the Pacific and the Atlantic, and if the
German scheme comes off we shall be beaten before a shot is fired."

"What does it mean?" asked the editor, "why is everybody buying wheat
so frantically? There is no shortage. The harvests in the United States
and Canada are good."

"There will be no harvests," said Beale solemnly; and the journalist
gaped at him.

CHAPTER XXXII

THE END OF VAN HEERDEN

Dr. van Heerden expected many things and was prepared for contingencies
beyond the imagination of the normally minded, but he was not prepared
to find in Oliva Cresswell a pleasant travelling-companion. When a man
takes a girl, against her will, from a pleasant suite at the best hotel
in London, compels her at the peril of death to accompany him on a
motor-car ride in the dead of the night, and when his offence is a
duplication of one which had been committed less than a week before, he
not unnaturally anticipates tears, supplications, or in the alternative
a frigid and unapproachable silence.

To his amazement Oliva was extraordinarily cheerful and talkative and
even amusing. He had kept Bridgers at the door of the car whilst he
investigated the pawn-broking establishment of Messrs. Rosenblaum Bros.,
and had returned in triumph to discover that the girl who up to then had
been taciturn and uncommunicative was in quite an amiable mood.

"I used to think," she said, "that motor-car abductions were the
invention of sensational writers, but you seem to make a practice of it.
You are not very original, Dr. van Heerden. I think I've told you tha