"I will do my best," she replied soberly, "and I will not be--too squeamish. I can look after myself, my friend."
In another room of the great building upon the Thames Embankment sat Deputy Chief Inspector Henri Froissart, a French detective officer who had been "lent" to the English service. Opposite him was sitting a young handsome man in the uniform of a captain in the British Army. Froissart was frowning and speaking in savage disrespect of Dawson, his immediate chief. "This English Dawson, with whom it is my misfortune to work, is of all men the most impossible. He is clever, as the Devil, but secretive--my faith! He tells me nothing. He lives in disguise of body and mind. There are twenty men in his face, his figure, and his dress. He comes to me as a police officer, a doctor, a soldier, a priest, even as an old hag who cleans the stairs. He deceives me continually, and laughs, laughs. He is a reproach and an insult. I have it in my mind to score off him; what do you say, mon ami?"
Froissart spoke in French, and the English officer replied in the same language. "With pleasure, in the way of business. I have been placed at your orders, not at old man Dawson's. Go ahead, what is the game?"
Froissart nodded approval. "I think that you can pass as a French officer or a French-speaking Belgian. Is it not so?"
"You should be able to certify that better than I can myself," replied the officer modestly. "As a boy I was brought up at Dinard in Normandy. I served two years in the French Army as a volunteer, a gunner. Then I went to St. Cyr, but England, the home of my father, claimed me, and I was given a commission in the Artillery. That was two years ago. I volunteered for the Flying Corps, served in it at the outbreak of war, but was invalided after that confounded accident which spoilt my nerve. I fell two hundred feet into the sea, and passed thirty hours in the bitter water before a destroyer picked me up. Thirty hours, my friend. My nerve went, and I was besides crippled by rheumatism of the heart. Then I was for a few weeks liaison officer on the Yser at the point where the English and Belgian lines met. The wet, the cold, were too great for me, and again I was invalided. I was a temporary captain without a job until you met me and asked for me to be attached to you for secret service. Yes, M. Froissart, I can pass as a French or a Belgian officer. It needs but the uniform."