pay, unexpended, will you take
it, my friend, and pay it to the fund for assisting the English
sailors interned in Holland? I should feel happier if they would
accept it, for I have, as you will presently learn, taken some of
their names in vain. I have not broken any oath, and I have not used
your pay; my honour is unstained.

* * * * *

[Again I paused and glanced at Dawson. He had not even winced--at
least not visibly--when Trehayne had held him free from every moral
scruple. He must, I think, have read the letter many times before he
had handed it to me. Cary looked troubled and uneasy. To him a spy had
been just a spy--he had never envisaged in his simple honest mind such
a super-spy as Trehayne. I went on.]

* * * * *

Now nothing was hidden from me; I had within my hands all the secrets
of England's Navy. My one difficulty--and it was not so great a one as
you may think--was communication with my country. Never for one moment
did it fail. Years before it had been thought out and prepared. I
varied my methods. At Portsmouth, during the early weeks of the War, I
had employed one means, at Greenock another, here yet another. The
basis of all was the same. It was much more difficult for me to
receive orders from my official superiors in Austria, but even those
came through once or twice. Never, during the whole of the past year,
have I failed to send every detail of the warships building and
completed here, of the ships damaged and repaired, of the movements of
the Fleets in so far as I could learn them. My country and her Allies
have seen the English at work here as clearly as if this river had
been within their own borders. John Trehayne has been their Eye--an
unsleeping, ever-watching Eye. Shall I tell you how I got my
information through? It was very simple, and was done under your own
keen nose. One of the R.N.V.R. who went with your Mr. Churchill to
Antwerp, and was interned in Holland, was a friend of mine at
Greenock, well known to me, I wrote to him constantly, though he never
received and was never meant to receive my letters. They were all
addressed to the care of a house in Haarlem where lived one of our
Austrian agents who was placed under my orders. All letters addressed
by me to my friend were received by him and forwarded post haste to
Vienna. Do you grasp the simplicity and subtlety of the device? My
friend was on the lists of those i