your father that Hugh was coming to dinner!"

Geraldine had slipped from the room. The Admiral blew his nose.

"I hope Geraldine's going to be sensible," he said. "I've always
maintained that Thomson was a fine fellow, only Geraldine seemed rather
carried away by that young Granet. Poor fellow! One can't say anything
about him now, but he was just the ordinary type of showy young soldier,
not fit to hold a candle to a man like Thomson."

Lady Conyers was a little startled.

"You have such sound judgement, Seymour," she murmured.

Thomson was a few minutes late for dinner but even the Admiral forgave
him.

"Just ourselves, Thomson," he said, as they made their way into the
dining-room. "What a shock the Chief gave me to-day! You've kept things
pretty dark. Inspector of Hospitals, indeed!"

Thomson smiled.

"That was my excuse," he explained, "for running backwards and forwards
between France and England at the beginning of the war. There's no
particular secret about my position now. I've had a very hard fight to
keep it, a very hard fight to make it a useful one. Until last night,
at any rate, it hasn't seemed to me that English people realised that
we were at war. Now, I hope at last that we are going to take the gloves
off. Do you know," he went on, a little later, "that in France they
think we're mad. Honestly, in my position, if I had had the French laws
at my back I believe that by to-day the war would have been over. As it
is, when I started even my post was a farce. We had to knuckle under the
whole of the time, to the civil authorities. They wanted to fine a spy
ten shillings or to bind him over to keep the peace! I've never had to
fight for anything so hard in my life as I've had to fight once or twice
for my file of men at the Tower. At the beginning of the war we'd catch
them absolutely red-handed. All they had to do was to surrender to the
civil authorities, and we had a city magistrate looking up statutes to
see how to deal with them."

"There are a good many things which will make strange reading after the
war is over," the Admiral said grimly. "I fancy that my late department
will provide a few sensations. Still, our very mistakes are our
justification. We were about as ready for war as Lady Conyers there is
to play Rugby football for Oxford."

"It has taken us the best part of a year to realise what war means,"
Thomson assented. "Even now there are people whom one meets every day
who seem to