How we shall be
able to dupe 'Miserable Renegade' now!"

The full importance of this discovery was not realised at the time,
for all their smuggling had hitherto been carried on merely for
pleasure and they had had no information of any importance to
communicate to their friends across the seas; but, in the light of
after-events, they realised that they had been led to make their
preparations and to have their methods in full working order before
the time came to use them in conveying dispatches from the Boer Secret
Service to President Kruger in Holland.

They were now in the possession of a scheme which defied detection,
and the next thing to be done was to inform some distant conspirator
of this valuable discovery and instruct him in the use of it.

That this could not be done through the post, my reader will
understand, and as reliable opportunities were becoming more rare,
Hansie had to wait some months and to possess her soul in patience
until at last some trusted friend, leaving the country, could be
persuaded to convey the important instructions.

When and how they were eventually sent I cannot tell with positive
certainty. There is a difference of opinion on this point between Mrs.
van Warmelo and her daughter, and there is no way of settling the
dispute, because Hansie's diary contains no word about the White
Envelope, for reasons which it will hardly be necessary to explain.

Mrs. van Warmelo says the instructions were dispatched in a false
double-bottom of an ordinary safety match-box. Hansie thinks they were
either hidden behind a photo-frame or in a tin of insect-powder, both
these methods having been employed on various occasions, but at
present we are only concerned with the fact that the instructions
reached their destination safely, and from that day until the end of
the war a gloriously free and uninterrupted communication was kept up
between Harmony and Alphen and one spot in the north of Holland, of
which we shall hear more as our story unfolds itself.

Further experimenting showed that the lemon-juice became visible after
a few days when written on certain papers, while on others there was
nothing to be seen after many weeks, and this danger was immediately
communicated to Holland as a very serious one, for it stands to reason
that the danger connected with the sending of the White Envelope
_from_ South Africa was nothing compared to the danger of receiving
one and having it censored three w