"If somehow this Capper should get through to Alexandria, wouldn't that make it somewhat embarrassing for me?"

"Not at all, my dear Woodhouse," she caught him up, with a little pat on his hand. "His instructions will be only to report to So-and-so at Alexandria; he will not have the slightest notion what work he is to do there. You can slip in unsuspected by the English, and the trick will be turned."

For a minute Woodhouse sat watching the cavortings of a dancer on the stage. Finally he put a question judiciously:

"The whole scheme, then, is--"

"This," she answered quickly. "Captain Woodhouse--the real Woodhouse, you know--is to be transferred from his present post at Wady Haifa, on the Nile, to Gibraltar--transfer is to be announced in the regular way within a week. As a member of the signal service he will have access to the signal tower on the Rock when he takes his new post, and that, as you know, will be very important."

"Very important!" Woodhouse echoed dryly.

"This Woodhouse arrives in Alexandria to await the steamer from Suez to Gib. He has no friends there--that much we know. Three men of the Wilhelmstrasse are waiting there, whose business it is to see that the real Woodhouse does not take the boat for Gib. They expect a man from Berlin to come to them, bearing a number from the Wilhelmstrasse--( the man who is to impersonate Woodhouse and as such take his place in the garrison on the Rock. There are two others of the Wilhelmstrasse at Gibraltar already; they, too, are eagerly awaiting the arrival of 'Woodhouse' from Alexandria. Capper, with a number, will start from Berlin for Alexandria. Capper will never arrive in Alexandria. You will."

"With a number--the number expected?" the man asked.

"If you are clever en route--yes," she answered, with a smile. "Wine, remember, is Billy Capper's best friend--and worst enemy."

"Then I will hear from you as to the time and route of departure for Alexandria?"

"To the very hour, yes. And, now, dear friend--"

Interruption came suddenly from the stage. The manager, in shirt-sleeves and with hair wildly rumpled over his eyes, came prancing out from the wings. He held up a pudgy hand to check the orchestra. Hundreds about the tables rose in a gust of excitement, of questioning wonder.

"H err en!" The stage manager's bellow carried to the farthest arches of the Winter Garden. "News just published by the general staff: Russia has mobilized five divisions on the frontier of East Prussia and Galicia!"

Not a sound save the sharp catching of breath over all the acre of tables. Then the stage manager nodded to the orchestra leader, and in a fury the brass mouths began to bray. Men climbed on table tops, women stood on chairs, and all--all sang in tremendous chorus:

"Deutschland, Deutschland über alles!"

CHAPTER III

BILLY CAPPER AT PLAY

THE night of July twenty-sixth. The scene is the table-cluttered sidewalk before the Cafe Pytheas, where the Cours St. Louis flings its night tide of idlers into the broader stream of the Cannebiere, Marseilles' Broadway--the white street of the great Provencal port. Here at the crossing of these two streets summer nights are incidents to stick in the traveler's mind long after he sees the gray walls of the Chateau d'lf fade below the steamer's rail. The flower girls in their little pulpits pressing dewy violets and fragrant clusters of rosebuds upon the strollers with persuasive eloquence; the mystical eyes of hooded Moors who see everything as they pass, yet seem to see so little; jostling Greeks, Levantines, burnoosed Jews from Algiers and red-trousered Senegalese--all the color from the hot lands of the Mediterranean is there.

But on the night of July twenty-sixth the old spirit of indolence, of pleasure seeking, flirtation, intriguing, which was wont to make this heart of arc-light life in Marseilles pulse languorously, was gone. Instead, an electric tenseness was abroad, pervading, infectious.