astounded at the white medical
plaster on the gas-pipe along the cornice. "What a narrow escape I've
had!"

"Yes. While I was in London, Vera went up with her maid and stayed at
the 'Star' at Kingussie, where she overheard the two men in
conversation, and learnt the clever trick they were playing with
Goldstein as the spy. She suspected that they intended to rid themselves
of your unwelcome surveillance, and returned at once to me in London.
Fortunately I discovered the dastardly plot, and that morning I cut the
cord."

"That fellow Straus is a much more desperate character than he looks."

"Yes. But we'll just go back and you can tell him your opinion of him,"
he laughed.

We went together along to No. 11. The spy had already left, but
ascending the stairs was Vera, in a long travelling-coat, her maid
following with the wraps.

She had just arrived from London, and after she had greeted us in her
usual merry manner, told us that she was the bearer of very important
news--news of the activity of spies in another quarter.

We quickly told her how we had managed to outwit Straus, while I, on my
part, thanked her warmly for having made that startling discovery which
had, no doubt, saved me from falling a victim to that dastardly plot
formed by one of the most ingenious of the many unscrupulous spies of
the Kaiser.

CHAPTER VI

THE SECRET OF THE NEW ARMOUR-PLATES

"I wonder if that fellow is aware of his danger?" remarked Ray, speaking
to himself behind the paper he was reading before the fire in New Stone
Buildings, one afternoon not long after we had returned from Scotland.

"What fellow?" I inquired.

"Why Professor Emden," he replied. "It seems that in a lecture at the
London Institution last night, he announced that he had discovered a new
process for the hardening of steel, which gives it no less than eight
times the resisting power of the present English steel!"

"Well!" I asked, looking across at my friend, and then glancing at Vera,
who had called and was seated with us, her hat still on, and a charming
figure to boot.

"My dear fellow, can't you see that such an invention would be of the
utmost value to our friends the Germans? They'd use it for the
armour-plates of their new navy."

"H'm! And you suspect they'll try and obtain Emden's secret--eh?"

"I don't suspect, I'm confident of it," he declared, throwing aside the
paper. "I suppose he's a bespectacled, unsuspicious man, like all