'm your oldest
friend, a sort of father. Be frank with me and you won't regret it. The
splendid work you've done has wiped out everything."

"I'm afraid it has," said he ruefully. "Wiped it out clean." With a
hitch of the shoulders he settled his pack more comfortably. "Well,
I'll tell you, Major. I thought I had brains. I still think I have. I
was on the point of getting a job in the Secret Service--Intelligence
Department. I had the whole thing cut and dried--to get at the
ramifications of German espionage in socialistic and so-called
intellectual circles in neutral and other countries. It would have been
ticklish work, for I should have been carrying my life in my hands. I
could have done it well. I started out by being a sort of
'intellectual' myself. All along I wanted to put my brains at the
service of my country. I took some time to hit upon the real way. I hit
upon it. I learned lots of things from Gedge. If he weren't an arrant
coward, he might be dangerous. He would be taking German money long
ago, but that he's frightened to death of it." He laughed. "It never
occurred to you, I suppose, a year ago," he continued, "that I spent
most of my days in London working like a horse."

"But," I cried--I felt myself flushing purple--and, when I flush
purple, the unregenerate old soldier in me uses language of a
corresponding hue--"But," I cried--and in this language I asked him why
he had told me nothing about it.

"The essence of the Secret Service, sir," replied this maddening young
man, "is--well--secrecy."

"You had a billet offered to you, of the kind you describe?"

"The offer reached me, very much belated, one day when I was half dead,
after having performed some humiliating fatigue duty. I think I had
persisted in trying to scratch an itching back on parade. Military
discipline, I need not tell you, Major, doesn't take into account the
sensitiveness of a recruit's back. It flatly denies such a phenomenon.
Now I think I can defy anything in God's quaint universe to make me
itch. But that's by the way. I tore the letter up and never answered
it. You do these things, sir, when the whole universe seems to be a
stumbling-block and an offence. Phyllis was the stumbling-block and the
rest of the cosmos was the other thing. That's why I have reason on my
side when I say that, all through Phyllis Gedge, I made an ass of
myself."

He clutched his rude coat with both hands. "An ass in sheep's clothing."

He drew