m?"

"Of course!"

"Only yesterday," Wyatt continued impressively, "she showed me a
letter--I read it, mind--from a cousin of Prince Hohenlowe. She met him
at Monte Carlo this year, and they had a sort of flirtation. In the
postscript he says: 'If you take my advice, don't go to Dinard this
August. Don't be further away from home than you can help at all this
summer.' What do you think that meant?"

"It sounds queer," Hebblethwaite admitted.

"Germany is bound to have a knock at us," Spencer Wyatt went on. "We've
talked of it so long that the words pass over our heads, as it were, but
she means it. And I tell you another thing. She means to do it while
there's a Radical Government in power here, and before Russia finishes
her reorganisation scheme. I am not a soldier, Hebblethwaite, but the
fellows we've got up at the top--not the soldiers themselves but the
chaps like old Busby and Simons--are simply out and out rotters. That's
plain speaking, isn't it, but you and I are the two men concerned in the
government of this country who do talk common sense to one another. We've
fine soldiers and fine organisers, but they've been given the go-by
simply because they know their job and would insist upon doing it
thoroughly, if at all. Russia will have another four million men ready to
be called up by the end of 1915, and not only that, but what is more
important, is that she'll have the arms and the uniforms for them.
Germany isn't going to wait for that. I've thought it all out. We are
going to get it in the neck before seven or eight months have passed, and
if you want to know the truth, Hebblethwaite, that's why I have taken a
risk and ordered these ships. The navy is my care, and it's my job to see
that we keep it up to the proper standard. Whose votes rob me of my extra
battleships? Why, just a handful of Labour men and Irishmen and cocoa
Liberals, who haven't an Imperial idea in their brains, who think war
belongs to the horrors of the past, and think they're doing their duty by
what they call 'keeping down expenses.' Hang it, Hebblethwaite, it's
worse than a man who won't pay fire insurance for his house in a
dangerous neighbourhood, so as to save a bit of money! What I've done I
stick to. Split on me, if you want to."

"I don't think I shall do that," Hebblethwaite said, "but honestly,
Wyatt, I can't follow you in your war talk. We got over the Agadir
trouble. We've got over a much worse one--the Balkan crisis. The