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198 Goggling resentfully, Monsieur Ducroy spluttered:

"Eh—what impudence is this?"

His smile unchanged, Lanyard bent forward and silently dropped the cylinder into the Frenchman's hand. At the same time he offered him a pocket magnifying-glass.

"What is this?" Ducroy persisted stupidly. "What—what—!"

"If monsieur will be good enough to unroll the papers and examine them with the aid of this glass—"

With a wondering grunt, the other complied, unrolling several small sheets of photographer's printing-out paper, to which several extraordinarily complicated and minute designs had been transferred—strongly resembling laborious efforts to conventionalize a spider's web.

But no sooner had Monsieur Ducroy viewed these through the glass, than he started violently, uttered an excited exclamation, and subjected them to an examination both prolonged and exacting.

"Monsieur is, no doubt, now satisfied?" Lanyard enquired when his patience would endure no longer.

"These are genuine?" the Minister of War demanded sharply, without looking up.

"Monsieur can readily discern notations made upon the drawings by the inventor, Georges Huysman, in his own hand. Furthermore, each plan has been marked in the lower left-hand corner with the word 'accepted' followed by the initials of the German Minister of War. I think this establishes beyond dispute the authenticity of these photographs of the plan for Huysman's invention."

"Yes," the Minister of War agreed breathlessly. "You