ward the Seventh.

More than once lately I have been a welcome visitor at the bright little
apartment within a stone's-throw of the Etoile.

CHAPTER IX

THE SECRET OF OUR NEW GUN

Ray and I were in Newcastle-on-Tyne a few weeks after our success in
frustrating the German plot against England.

Certain observations we had kept had led us to believe that a frantic
endeavour was being made to obtain certain details of a new type of gun,
of enormous power and range, which at that moment was under construction
at the Armstrong Works at Elswick.

The Tyne and Tees have long ago been surveyed by Germany, and no doubt
the accurate and detailed information pigeon-holed in the Intelligence
Bureau at Berlin would, if seen by the good people of Newcastle, cause
them a _mauvais quart d'heure_, as well as considerable alarm.

Yet there are one or two secrets of the Tyne and its defences which are
fortunately not yet the property of our friends the enemy.

Vera was in Switzerland with her father.

But from our quarters at the Station Hotel in Newcastle we made many
careful and confidential inquiries. We discovered, among other things,
the existence of a secret German club in a back street off Grainger
Street, and the members of this institution we watched narrowly.

Now no British workman will willingly give away any secret to a foreign
Power, and we did not suspect that any one employed at the great Elswick
Works would be guilty of treachery. In these days of socialistic,
fire-brand oratory there is always, however, the danger of a discharged
workman making revelations with objects of private vengeance, never
realising that it is a nation's secrets that he may be betraying. Yet in
the course of a fortnight's inquiry we learned nothing to lead us to
suspect that our enemies would obtain the information they sought.

Among the members of the secret German club--which, by the way, included
in its membership several Swiss and Belgians--was a middle-aged man who
went by the name of John Barker, but who was either a German or a Swede,
and whose real name most probably ended in "burger."

He was, we found, employed as foreign-correspondence clerk in the
offices of a well-known shipping firm, and amateur photography seemed
his chief hobby. He had a number of friends, one of whom was a man named
Charles Rosser, a highly respectable, hardworking man, who was a
foreman fitter at Elswick.

We watched the pair closely, for