“Well?” I said, turning over some yellow pages.
“Dollmann!” cried Davies. “Dollmann wrote it.” I turned to the title-page, and read: “By Lieut. X——, R.N.” The name itself conveyed nothing to me, but I began to understand. Davies went on: “The name’s on the back, too—and I’m certain it’s the last she looked at.”
“And there’s the man himself. Ass that I am not to have seen it before! Look at the frontispiece.”
It was a sorry piece of illustration of the old-fashioned sort, lacking definition and finish, but effective notwithstanding; for it was evidently the reproduction, though a cheap and imperfect process, of a photograph. It represented a small yacht at anchor below some woods, with the owner standing on deck in his shirt sleeves: a well-knit, powerful man, young, of middle height, clean-shaved. There appeared to be nothing remarkable about the face; the portrait being on too small a scale, and the expression, such as it was, being of the fixed “photographic” character.
“How do you know him? You said he was fifty, with a greyish beard.”
“By the shape of his head; that hasn’t changed. Look how it widens at the top, and then flattens—sort of wedge shaped—with a high, steep forehead; you’d hardly notice it in that” (the points were not very noticeable, but I saw what Davies meant). “The height and figure are right, too; and the dates are about right. Look at the bottom.”
Underneath the picture was the name of a yacht and a date. The publisher’s date on the title-page was the same.
“Sixteen years ago,” said Davies. “He looks thirty odd in that, doesn’t he? And fifty now.”
“Let’s work the thing out. Sixteen years ago he was still an Englishman, an officer in Her Majesty’s Navy. Now he’s a German. At some time between this and then, I suppose, he came to grief—disgrace, flight, exile. When did it happen?”
“They’ve been here three years; von Brüning said so.”
“It was long before that. She has talked German from a child. What’s her age, do you think—nineteen or twenty?”
“Say she was four when this book was published. The crash must have come not long after.”
“And they’ve been hiding in Germany since.
“I never saw another copy; picked this up on a second-hand bookstall for threepence.”