"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.
"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.
"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 scientists. _The Times_ is enthusiastic over the discovery--declaring that the Admiralty should secure it at once, if they have not already done so. It's being made experimentally at Sheffield, it seems, and has been tried in secret somewhere out near the Orkneys. Admiralty experts are astounded at the results."
"Who is Emden?" I asked. "Just look at 'Who's Who?' It's by your elbow, old chap."