Napier told himself that he knew what had been brought to the surface, and what effect that bringing had had on Julian.
The spectacle of injustice, or even the danger of injustice, would at any time make Julian Grant forget his own interests and yours and anybody's who wasn't being actively oppressed.
"I've had no time for picnicking," Julian answered shortly.
"Well, since you're championing Schwarzenberg, it's your business to see she isn't made a tool of. You heard how the Pforzheims vanished. I've wondered,"--Napier found it curiously difficult to go on. There was a quality--he had noticed it before--a something in Julian's frankness which put astuteness out of countenance, something that made suspicion seem not only vulgar but melodramatic. Napier felt obliged to throw a dash of whimsicality, of confessed extravagance, into the speculation, "Whether the reason we weren't allowed to land on Gull Island was those Pforzheims. They may have made an emergency camp out of your Smugglers' Cave."
Julian's weary disgust lightened a little. "I had no notion you were so romantic, Gavan."
"Very well, then. If you won't look into the matter, I must get some one else. And set afoot a new crop of rumors. Risk involving Sir William in responsibility for--"
"Oh, see here! I'll go, and hold an inquisition on the gulls and cormorants."
Napier thanked him a little sheepishly. "Of course I don't expect you to find anything. I only feel we've got to make sure."
Sir William and Napier returned to London to face those days of intolerable suspense, when men carried about like a waking nightmare the new proof that an impregnable fortress was a thing of the past. The defenses of Liège had failed. A vast system of forts had been pounded into ruin. Through breach after breach, the German hosts were pouring. People far away from the scenes of carnage and chaos woke in the night under a clutch of dread. What is it? What's the matter with life? _The Germans!_ On and on they were coming, and nothing, it seemed, could stop them.
Then came the Mons retreat and the Battle of the Marne. Belgium was in ruins, but the German flood had been stayed. Sir William, worn and aged after a second heart attack, carefully concealed from every one except the doctor, and Gavan came down from London to spend Saturday night and Sunday at the place he had taken on the Essex coast. Apart from public anxieties, Sir William had been subject to the annoyance of questions in the House, about his chauffeur--a member of his Majesty's Government couldn't be driven about by an unnaturalized German. A new chauffeur had brought Sir William from town.