Lyons and a concierge in a big hotel at St Moritz.
His most important discovery was that there was a second cipher in the
return messages sent from Switzerland, different from the one that the
Gussiter lot used in England. He got this cipher, but though he could
read it he couldn't make anything out of it. He concluded that it was a
very secret means of communication between the inner circle of the Wild
Birds, and that Ivery must be at the back of it ... But he was still a
long way from finding out anything that mattered.

Then the whole situation changed, for Mary got in touch with Ivery. I
must say she behaved like a shameless minx, for she kept on writing to
him to an address he had once given her in Paris, and suddenly she got
an answer. She was in Paris herself, helping to run one of the railway
canteens, and staying with her French cousins, the de Mezieres. One day
he came to see her. That showed the boldness of the man, and his
cleverness, for the whole secret police of France were after him and
they never got within sight or sound. Yet here he was coming openly in
the afternoon to have tea with an English girl. It showed another
thing, which made me blaspheme. A man so resolute and single-hearted in
his job must have been pretty badly in love to take a risk like that.

He came, and he called himself the Capitaine Bommaerts, with a
transport job on the staff of the French G.Q.G. He was on the staff
right enough too. Mary said that when she heard that name she nearly
fell down. He was quite frank with her, and she with him. They are both
peacemakers, ready to break the laws of any land for the sake of a
great ideal. Goodness knows what stuff they talked together. Mary said
she would blush to think of it till her dying day, and I gathered that
on her side it was a mixture of Launcelot Wake at his most pedantic and
schoolgirl silliness.

He came again, and they met often, unbeknown to the decorous Madame de
Mezieres. They walked together in the Bois de Boulogne, and once, with
a beating heart, she motored with him to Auteuil for luncheon. He spoke
of his house in Picardy, and there were moments, I gathered, when he
became the declared lover, to be rebuffed with a hoydenish shyness.
Presently the pace became too hot, and after some anguished arguments
with Bullivant on the long-distance telephone she went off to
Douvecourt to Lady Manorwater's hospital. She went there to escape from
him, but mainly, I think, to ha