ated at the
piano. Without doubt Michael had a real existence for her, but there
was no sign whatever that she hailed it, as a girl so unmistakably does,
when she sees it as part of herself.

"More about them," she said. "What are they? Who are they?"

He outlined for her, giving the half-English, half-German parentage, the
shadow-like mother, the Bavarian father, Sylvia's sudden and comet-like
rising in the musical heaven, while her brother, seven years her senior,
had spent his time in earning in order to give her the chance which she
had so brilliantly taken. Now it was to be his turn, the shackles of his
drudgery no longer impeded him, and he, so Michael radiantly prophesied,
was to have his rocket-like leap to the zenith, also.

"And he's German?" she asked.

"Yes. Wasn't he rude about my being a toy soldier? But that's the
natural German point of view, I suppose."

Michael strolled to the fireplace.

"Hermann's so funny," he said. "For days and weeks together you would
think he was entirely English, and then a word slips from him like that,
which shows he is entirely German. He was like that in Munich, when the
Emperor appeared and sent for me."

Aunt Barbara drew her chair a little nearer the fire, and sat up.

"I want to hear about that," she said.

"But I've told you; he was tremendously friendly in a national manner."

"And that seemed to you real?" she asked.

Michael considered.

"I don't know that it did," he said. "It all seemed to me rather
feverish, I think."

"And he asked quantities of questions, I think you said."

"Hundreds. He was just like what he was when he came to Ashbridge. He
reviewed the Yeomanry, and shot pheasants, and spent the afternoon in a
steam launch, apparently studying the deep-water channel of the river,
where it goes underneath my father's place; and then in the evening
there was a concert."

Aunt Barbara did not heed the concert.

"Do you mean the channel up from Harwich," she asked, "of which the
Admiralty have the secret chart?"

"I fancy they have," said Michael. "And then after the concert there was
the torchlight procession, with the bonfire on the top of the hill."

"I wasn't there. What else?"

"I think that's all," said Michael. "But what are you driving at, Aunt
Barbara?"

She was silent a moment.

"I'm driving at this," she said. "The Germans are accumulating a vast
quantity of knowledge about England. Tony, for instance, has a German
valet,