“Nothing. Merely that he was in danger, but had found shelter with a good friend, and that I would hear from him before the 15th of June . He gave me no address, but said he was living near Portland Place. I think his object was to clear you if anything happened. When I got it I went to Scotland Yard, went over the details of the inquest, and concluded that you were the friend. We made inquiries about you, Mr. Hannay, and found you were respectable. I thought I knew the motives for your disappearance⁠—not only the police, the other one too⁠—and when I got Harry’s scrawl I guessed at the rest. I have been expecting you any time this past week.” You can imagine what a load this took off my mind. I felt a free man once more, for I was now up against my country’s enemies only, and not my country’s law.

“Now let us have the little notebook,” said Sir Walter.

It took us a good hour to work through it. I explained the cipher, and he was jolly quick at picking it up. He amended my reading of it on several points, but I had been fairly correct, on the whole. His face was very grave before he had finished, and he sat silent for a while.

“I don’t know what to make of it,” he said at last. “He is right about one thing⁠—what is going to happen the day after tomorrow. How the devil can it have got known? That is ugly enough in itself. But all this about war and the Black Stone⁠—it reads like some wild melodrama. If only I had more confidence in Scudder’s judgement. The trouble about him was that he was too romantic. He had the artistic temperament, and wanted a story to be better than God meant it to be. He had a lot of odd biases, too. Jews, for example, made him see red. Jews and the high finance.