merely nodded his head
approvingly.

"You're quite right," he said. "I had made up my mind you should hear
some of the truth tonight in any case; that was the chief reason why
I asked you to come and pick me up. When I saw you had brought Mr.
Lyndon with you, I determined to tell you everything. It's the
simplest and best way, after all."

He stopped for a moment, and we all three sat there in silence, while
the _Betty_ slowly throbbed her way forward, splashing off the black
water from either bow. Then Latimer began to speak again quite
quietly.

"I _am_ in the Secret Service," he said; "but you can forget the rest
of what I told you the other night, Morrison. I am after bigger game
than a couple of German spies--though they come into it right enough.
I am on the track of three friends of Mr. Lyndon's, who just now are
as badly wanted in Whitehall as they probably are in hell."

I leaned back with a certain curious thrill of satisfaction.

"I thought so," I said softly.

He glanced at me with his keen blue eyes, and the light of the lamp
shining on his face showed up its square dogged lines of strength and
purpose. It was a fine face--the face of a man without weakness and
without fear.

"It's nearly twelve months ago now," he continued, "that we first
began to realize at headquarters that there was something queer going
on. There's always a certain amount of spying in every country--the
sort of quiet, semi-official kind that doesn't do any one a ha'porth
of practical harm. Now and then, of course, somebody gets dropped on,
and there's a fuss in the papers, but nobody really bothers much about
it. This was different, however. Two or three times things happened
that did matter very much indeed. They were the sort of things that
showed us pretty plainly we were up against something entirely
new--some kind of organized affair that had nothing on earth to do
with the usual casual spying.

"Well, I made up my mind to get to the bottom of it. Casement, who is
nominally the head of our department, gave me an absolutely free hand,
and I set to work in my own way quite independently of the police. It
was six months before I got hold of a clue. Then some designs--some
valuable battleship designs--disappeared from Devonport Dockyard. It
was a queer case, but there were one or two things about it which made
me pretty sure it was the work of the same gang, and that for the
time, at all events, they were somewhere in the