“More about them,” she said. “What are they? Who are they?”
He outlined for her, giving the half-English, half-German parentage, the shadow-like mother, the Bavarian father, Sylvia’s sudden and comet-like rising in the musical heaven, while her brother, seven years her senior, had spent his time in earning in order to give her the chance which she had so brilliantly taken. Now it was to be his turn, the shackles of his drudgery no longer impeded him, and he, so Michael radiantly prophesied, was to have his rocket-like leap to the zenith, also.
“Yes. Wasn’t he rude about my being a toy soldier? But that’s the natural German point of view, I suppose.”
“Hermann’s so funny,” he said. “For days and weeks together you would think he was entirely English, and then a word slips from him like that, which shows he is entirely German. He was like that in Munich, when the Emperor appeared and sent for me.”
Aunt Barbara drew her chair a little nearer the fire, and sat up.
“But I’ve told you; he was tremendously friendly in a national manner.”
“And that seemed to you real?” she asked.
“I don’t know that it did,” he said. “It all seemed to me rather feverish, I think.”
“And he asked quantities of questions, I think you said.”
“Hundreds. He was just like what he was when he came to Ashbridge. He reviewed the Yeomanry, and shot pheasants, and spent the afternoon in a steam launch, apparently studying the deep-water channel of the river, where it goes underneath my father’s place; and then in the evening there was a concert.”
“Do you mean the channel up from Harwich,” she asked, “of which the Admiralty have the secret chart?”
“I fancy they have,” said Michael. “And then after the concert there was the torchlight procession, with the bonfire on the top of the hill.”
“I think that’s all,” said Michael. “But what are you driving at, Aunt Barbara?”
“I’m driving at this,” she said. “The Germans are accumulating a vast quantity of knowledge about England. Tony, for instance, has a German valet, and when he went down to Portsmouth the other day to see the American ship that was there, he took him with him. And the man took a camera and was found photographing where no photography is allowed. Did you see anything of a camera when the Emperor came to Ashbridge?”