"Do you know, my dear, Cynthia Maxwell is simply going to die with envy when she sees me in this!"

The plump little mistress of Government House, standing before a full-length mirror, in her boudoir, surveyed herself with intense satisfaction. Her arms and neck burst startlingly from the clinging sheath of the incomparable Doeuillet gown that was Jane Gerson's douceur for official protection; in the flood of morning light pouring through the mullioned windows Lady Crandall seemed a pink and white—and somewhat florid—lily in bloom out of time. Hildebrand's buyer, on her knees and with deft fingers busy with the soft folds of the skirt, answered through a mouthful of pins:

"Poor Cynthia; my heart goes out to her."

"Oh, it needn't!" Lady Crandall answered, with a tilting of her strictly Iowa style nose. "The Maxwell person has made me bleed more than once here on the Rock with the gowns a fond mama sends her from Paris. But, honestly, isn't this a bit low for a staid middle-aged person like myself? I'm afraid I'll have trouble getting my precious Doeuillet past the censor." Lady Crandall plumed herself with secret joy.

Jane looked up, puzzled.

"Oh, that's old Lady Porter—a perfect dragon," the general's wife rattled on. "Poor old dear; she thinks the Lord put her on the Rock for a purpose. Her own collars get higher and higher. I believe if she ever was presented at court she'd emulate the old Scotch lady who followed the law of décolleté, but preserved her self-respect by wearing a red flannel chest protector. You must meet her."

"I'm afraid I won't have time to get a look at your dragon," Jane returned, with a little laugh, all happiness. "Now that Sir George has promised me I can sail on the Saxonia Friday——"

"You really must——" The envious eyes of Lady Crandall fell on the pile of plans—potent Delphic mysteries to charm the heart of woman—that lay scattered about upon the floor.

Jane sat back on her heels and surveyed the melting folds of satin with an artist's eye.

"If you only knew—what it means to me to get back with my baskets full of French beauties! Why, when I screwed up my courage two months ago to go to old Hildebrand and ask him to send me abroad as his buyer—I'd been studying drawing and French at nights for three years in preparation, you see—he roared like the dear old lion he is and said I was too young. But I cooed and pleaded, and at last he said I could come—on trial, and so——"

"He'll purr like a pussy-cat when you get back," Lady Crandall put in, with a pat on the brown head at her knees.

"Maybe. If I can slip into New York with my little baskets while all the other buyers are still over here, cabling tearfully for money to get home or asking their firms to send a warship to fetch them—why, I guess the pennant's mine all right."

The eternal feminine, so strong in Iowa's transplanted stock, prompted a mischievous question:

"Then you won't be leaving somebody behind when you sail—somebody who seemed awfully nice and—foreigny and all that? All our American girls find the moonlight over on this side infectious. Witness me—a 'finishing trip' abroad after school days—and see where I've finished—on a Rock!" Lady Crandall bubbled laughter. A shrewd downward sweep of her eye was just in time to catch a flush mounting to Jane's cheeks.

"Well, a Mysterious Stranger has crossed my path," Jane admitted. "He was very nice, but mysterious."

"Oh!" A delighted gurgle from the older woman. "Tell me all about it—a secret for these ancient walls to hear."

Jane was about to reply when second thought checked her tongue. Before her flashed that strange meeting with Captain Woodhouse the night before—his denial of their former meeting, followed by his curious insistence on her keeping faith with him by not revealing the fact of their acquaintance. She had promised—why she had promised she could no more divine than the reason for his asking; but a promise it was that she would not betray his confidence. More than once since that minute in the reception room of the Hotel Splendide Jane Gerson had reviewed the whole baffling circumstance in her mind and a growing resentment at this stranger's demand, as well as at her own compliance with it, was rising in her heart. Still, this Captain Woodhouse was "different," and—this Jane sensed without effort to analyze—the mystery which he threw about himself but served to set him apart from the common run of men. She evaded Lady Crandall's probing with a shrug of the shoulders.

"It's a secret which I myself do not know, Lady Crandall—and never will."

Back to the o'erweening lure of the gown the flitting fancy of the general's lady betook itself.

"You—don't think this is a shade too young for me, Miss Gerson?" Anxiety pleaded to be quashed.

"Nonsense!" Jane laughed.

"But I'm no chicken, my dear. If you would look me up in our family Bible back in Davenport you'd find——"

"People don't believe everything they read in the Bible any more," Jane assured her. "Your record and Jonah's would both be open to doubt."

"You're very comforting," Lady Crandall beamed. Her maid knocked and entered on the lady's crisp: "Come!"

"The general wishes to see you, Lady Crandall, in the library."

"Tell the general I'm in the midst of trying on——" Lady Crandall began, then thought better of her excuse. She dropped the shimmering gown from her shoulders and slipped into a kimono.

"Some stuffy plan for entertaining somebody or other, my dear"—this to Jane. "The real burden of being governor-general of the Rock falls on the general's wife. Just slip into your bonnet, and when I'm back we'll take that little stroll through the Alameda I've promised you for this morning." She clutched her kimono about her and whisked out of the room.

General Crandall, just rid of the dubious pleasure of Billy Capper's company, was pacing the floor of the library office thoughtfully. He looked up with a smile at his wife's entrance.

"Helen, I want you to do something for me," he said.

"Certainly, dear." Lady Crandall was not an unpleasing picture of ripe beauty to look on, in the soft drape of her Japanese robe. Even in his worry, General Crandall found himself intrigued for the minute.

"There's a new chap in the signal service—just in from Egypt—name's Woodhouse. I wish you would invite him to tea, my dear."

"Of course; any day."

"This afternoon, if you please, Helen," the general followed.

His wife looked slightly puzzled.

"This afternoon? But, George, dear, isn't that—aren't you—ah—rushing this young man to have him up to Government House so soon after his arrival?" She suddenly remembered something that caused her to reverse herself. "Besides, I've asked him to dinner—the dinner I'm to give the Americans to-morrow night before they sail."

General Crandall looked his surprise.

"You didn't tell me that. I didn't know you had met him."

"Just happened to," Lady Crandall cut in hastily. "Met him at the Hotel Splendide last night when I brought Miss Gerson home with me."

"What was Woodhouse doing at the Splendide?" the general asked suspiciously.

"Why, spending the night, you foolish boy. Just off the Princess Mary, he was. I believe he did Miss Gerson some sort of a service—and I met him in that way—quite informally."

"Did Miss Gerson—a service—hum!"

"Oh, a trifling thing! It seemed she had only French money, and that cautious Almer fellow wouldn't accept it. Captain Woodhouse gave her English gold for it—to pay her bill. But why——"

"Has Miss Gerson seen him since?" General Crandall asked sharply.

"Why, George, dear, how could she? We haven't been up from the breakfast table an hour."

"Woodhouse was here less than an hour ago to pay his duty call and report," he explained. "I thought perhaps he might have met our guest somewhere in the garden as he was coming or going."

"He did send her some lovely roses." Lady Crandall brightened at this, to her, patent inception of a romance; she doted on romances. "They were in Miss Gerson's room before she was down to breakfast."

"Roses, eh? And they met informally at the Splendide only last night." Suspicion was weighing the general's words. "Isn't that a bit sudden? I say, do you think Miss Gerson and this Captain Woodhouse had met somewhere before last night?"

"I hardly think so—she on her first trip to the Continent and he coming from Egypt. But——"

"No matter. I want him here to tea this afternoon." The general dismissed the subject and turned to his desk. His lady's curiosity would not be so lightly turned away.

"All these questions—aren't they rather absurd? Is anything wrong?" She ran up to him and laid her hands on his shoulders.

"Of course not, dear." He kissed her lightly on the brow. "Now run along and play with that new gown Miss Gerson gave you. I imagine that's the most important thing on the Rock to-day."

Lady Crandall gave her soldier-husband a peck on each cheek, and slapped back to her room. When he was alone again, General Crandall resumed his restless pacing. Resolution suddenly crystallized, and he stepped to the desk telephone. He called a number.

"That you, Bishop? ... General Crandall speaking.... Bishop, you were here on the Rock seven years ago? ... Good! ... Pretty good memory for names and faces, eh? ... Right! ... I want you to come to Government House for tea at five this afternoon.... But run over for a little talk with me some time earlier—an hour from now, say. Rather important.... You'll be here.... Thank you."

General Crandall sat at his desk and tried to bring himself down to the routine crying from accumulated papers there. But the canker Billy Capper had implanted in his mind would not give him peace. Major-general Crandall was a man cast in the stolid British mold; years of army discipline and tradition of the service had given to his conservatism a hard grain. In common with most of those in high command, he held to the belief that nothing existed—nothing could exist—which was not down in the regulations of the war office, made and provided. For upward of twenty-five years he had played the hard game of the service—in Egypt, in Burma, on the broiling rocks of Aden, and here, at last, on the key to the Mediterranean. During all those years he had faithfully pursued his duty, had stowed away in his mind the wisdom disseminated in blue-bound books by that corporate paragon of knowledge at home, the war office. But never had he read in anything but fluffy fiction of a place or a thing called the Wilhelmstrasse, reputed by the scriveners to be the darkest closet and the most potent of all the secret chambers of diplomacy. The regulations made no mention of a Wilhelmstrasse, even though they provided the brand of pipe clay that should brighten men's pith helmets and stipulated to the ounce an emergency ration. Therefore, to the official military mind at least, the Wilhelmstrasse was non-existent.

But here comes a beach-comber, a miserable jackal from the back alleys of society, and warns the governor-general of the Rock that he has a man from the Wilhelmstrasse—a spy bent on some unfathomable mission—in his very forces on the Rock. He says that an agent of the enemy has dared masquerade as a British officer in order to gain admission inside the line............