st be passing in Hillyard's mind, he said:

"You know very well, senor, that I should be mad if I gave help to the
Germans. I am in your hands. You and France have but to speak the word,
and every felucca of mine is off the seas. But what then! There are
eighteen thousand men at once without food or work thrown adrift upon
the coast of Spain. Will not Germany find use for those eighteen
thousand men?"

Hillyard agreed. The point was shrewd. It was an open, unanswerable
reply to the unuttered threat which perhaps Hillyard might be prompted
to use.

"I have spoken," continued Jose Medina. "Now it is for you, senor. Tell
me what within the limits of my neutrality I can do to prove to you the
sincerity of my respect for England?"

Hillyard took a sheet of paper and a pencil from his pocket. He drew a
rough map.

"Here are the Balearic Islands; here, farther to the west, the
Columbretes; here the African coast; here the mainland of Spain. Now
watch, I beg you, senor, whilst I sketch in the routes of your feluccas.
At Oran in Africa your factories stand. From them, then, we start. We
draw a broad thick line from Oran to the north-east coast of Mallorca,
that coast upon which we look down from these windows, a coast
honeycombed with caves and indented with creeks like an edge of fine
lace--a very storehouse of a coast. Am I not right, Senor Don Jose?" He
laughed, in a friendly good-humoured way, but the face of Jose Medina
did not lose one shade of its impassiveness. He did not deny that the
caves of this coast were the storehouse of his tobacco; nor did he
agree.

"Let us see!" he said.

"So I draw a thick line, since all your feluccas make for this island
and this part of the island first of all. From here they diverge--you
will correct me, I hope, if I am wrong."

"I do not say that I shall correct you if you are wrong," said Jose
Medina.

Hillyard was now drawing other and finer lines which radiated like the
sticks of an outspread fan from the north-east coast of Mallorca to the
Spanish mainland; and he went on drawing them, unperturbed by Jose's
refusal to assist in his map-making. Some of the lines--a few--ended at
the Islands of the Columbretes, sixty miles off Valencia.

"Your secret storehouse, I believe, senor," he remarked pleasantly.

"A cruiser of our Government examined these islands most carefully a
fortnight ago upon representations from the Allies, and found nothing of
any kind to excite interes