h of the man about whom so many queer rumours
had been afloat.

Rumours! Ah, how well he recollected one of them--a rumour that had gone
around the Service--namely that he had retired with the money earned by
selling to a foreign power a certain secret concerning "plotting." For
that reason, it was said, he had lived so constantly abroad. Though the
offence had never been brought home to him by the Admiralty, yet the
rumour had never been contradicted. Mud thrown, alas! always sticks.

Was it true, or was it a lie? his friend was wondering, as he stood
looking out upon that calm blue summer sea, bathed in the warm light of
that August afternoon, the sea in the deep bed of which lay the new link
connecting Berlin with London.

What could Dick Harborne have been doing, motoring so constantly about
that rural, out-of-the-world corner of England, that delightful little
strip of the open Norfolk coast so aptly termed Poppyland? That he was
not there as a summer visitor was quite certain. He had his headquarters
in Norwich, twenty miles away, and his constant journeys over the roads
between the Norfolk capital and the sea were certainly not without some
definite motive.

That Strantz should have recognised Harborne's fair companion was also
remarkable. What could she have been doing in Bremen? he wondered.

Noel Barclay looked around him anxiously. The wind, which had risen for
the past couple of hours while he had been in Mundesley, was now
dropping. With the sunset he would have a nice flight back to the
hangars standing on the shore beyond Yarmouth. The "old bus," as the
fine Bleriot monoplane was affectionately termed by the four
flying-officers at the air station, had been running like a clock.
Indeed he had flown her from Eastchurch two days previously, and
intended, on the morrow, to make a flight to inspect the station up at
Scarborough.

He lit another cigarette and sat down upon a boat to think, the white
surf rolling almost to his feet.

During the time the naval aviator had been watching the testing of the
cable, a tall, broad-shouldered, well-dressed, clean-shaven,
broad-browed young man in a drab tweed golf suit and cap, a man whose
great, dark, deep-set eyes wore a keen, intense look, and whose
countenance was one which once seen would be easily remembered, lounged
into the Old Ship Hotel. He was accompanied by a pretty, dark-haired
girl in a summer gown of cream serge and wearing a neat little hat of