Page:Biggers and Ritchie - Inside the Lines.djvu/168

 the Wilhelmstrasse like you and me. At any moment in the last two months he could have laid a hand on that combination. But we thought it better to wait until necessity came. When the fleet arrives you will have that combination; you will go with it to Room D, and after that"

"The deluge," the other finished.

"Yes—yes! Our country master of the sea at last, and by the work of the Wilhelmstrasse—despised spies who are shot like dogs when they're caught, but die heroes' deaths." The hotel proprietor checked himself in the midst of his rhapsody, and came back to more practical details:

"But this afternoon—that man from Alexandria who called you by name. That looked bad—very bad. He knows something?"

Woodhouse, who had been expecting the question, and who preferred not to share an anxiety he felt himself best fitted to cope with alone, turned the other's question aside:

"Never met him before in my life to my best recollection. My name he picked up on the Princess Mary, of course; I won a pool one day, and he may have heard some one mention