at did you do for my brother?"

"Your brother had deserted from the front--that is the most difficult
class of business we have to deal with--we procured him a _permis de
sejour_ for fifteen days and a post in a safe place where no enquiries
would be made after him."

"And then?" I cried, trembling with curiosity.

The Jew shrugged his shoulders, waving his hands to and fro in the air.

"Then he disappeared. I saw him a few days before he went, and he gave
me the instructions I have repeated to you for anybody who should come
asking for him."

"But didn't he tell you where he was going?"

"He didn't even tell me he was going, Herr. He just vanished."

"When was this?"

"Somewhere about the first week in July ... it was the week of the bad
news from France."

The message was dated July 1st, I remembered.

"I have a good set of Swedish papers," the Jew continued, "very
respectable timber merchant ... with those one could live in the best
hotels and no one say a word. Or Hungarian papers, a party rejected
medically ... very safe those, but perhaps the gentleman doesn't speak
Hungarian. That would be essential."

"I am in the same case as my brother," I said, "I must disappear."

"Not a deserter, Herr?" The Jew cringed at the word.

"Yes," I said. "After all, why not?"

"I daren't do this kind of business any more, my dear sir, I really
daren't! They are making it too dangerous."

"Come, come!" I said, "you were boasting just now that you could smooth
out any difficulties. You can produce me a very satisfactory passport
from somewhere, I am sure!"

"Passport! Out of the question, my dear sir! Let once one of my
passports go wrong and I am ruined. Oh, no! no passports where deserters
are concerned! I don't like the business ... it's not safe! At the
beginning of the war ... ah! that was different! Oi, oi, but they ran
from the Yser and from Ypres! Oi, oi, and from Verdun! But now the
police are more watchful. No! It is not worth it! It would cost you too
much money, besides."

I thought the miserable cur was trying to raise the price on me, but I
was mistaken. He was frightened: the business was genuinely distasteful
to him.

I tried, as a final attempt to persuade him, an old trick: I showed him
my money. He wavered at once, and, after many objections, protesting to
the last, he left the room. He returned with a handful of filthy papers.

"I oughtn't to do it; I know I shall rue it; but you have over