“A mixture of French, Italian, and German, I believe,” Baring replied.  “Her husband is Benedek the painter, you know.”

“I’ve heard of him,” Norgate assented.  “What are you doing now?”

“I’ve had a job up in town for a week or so, at the Admiralty,” Baring explained.  “We are examining the plans of a new—­but you wouldn’t be interested in that.”

“I’m interested in anything naval,” Norgate assured him.

“In any case, it isn’t my job to talk about it,” Baring continued apologetically.  “We’ve just got a lot of fresh regulations out.  Any one would think we were going to war to-morrow.”

“I suppose war isn’t such an impossible event,” Norgate remarked.  “They all say that the Germans are dying to have a go at you fellows.”

Baring grinned.

“They wouldn’t have a dog’s chance,” he declared.  “That’s the only drawback of having so strong a navy.  We don’t stand any chance of getting a fight.”

“You’ll have all you can do to keep up, judging by the way they talk in Germany,” Norgate observed.

“Are you just home from there?”

Norgate nodded.  “I am at the Embassy in Berlin, or rather I have been,” he replied.  “I am just home on six months’ leave.”

“And that’s your real impression?” Baring enquired eagerly.  “You really think that they mean to have a go at us?”

“I think there’ll be a war soon,” Norgate confessed.  “It probably won’t commence at sea, but you’ll have to do your little lot, without a doubt.”

Baring gazed across the room.  There was a hard light in his eyes.

“Sounds beastly, I suppose,” he muttered, “but I wish to God it would come!  A war would give us all a shaking up—­put us in our right places.  We all seem to go on drifting any way now.  The Services are all right when there’s a bit of a scrap going sometimes, but there’s a nasty sort of feeling of dry rot about them, when year after year all your preparations end in the smoke of a sham fight.  Now I am on this beastly land job—­but there, I mustn’t bother you with my grumblings.”

“I am interested,” Norgate assured him.  “Did you say you were considering something new?”

Baring nodded.

“Plans of a new submarine,” he confided.  “There’s no harm in telling you as much as that.”

Mrs. Benedek, who was dummy for the moment, strolled over to them.

“I am not sure,” she murmured, “whether I like the expression you have brought back from Germany with you, Mr. Norgate.”

Norgate smiled.  “Have I really acquired the correct diplomatic air?” he asked.  “I can assure you that it is an accident—­or perhaps I am imitative.”

“You have acquired,” she complained, “an air of unnatural reserve.  You seem as though you had found some problem in life so weighty that you could not lose sight of it even for a moment.  Ah!”

The glass-topped door had been flung wide open with an unusual flourish.  A barely perceptible start escaped Norgate.  It was indeed an unexpected appearance, this!  Dressed with a perfect regard to the latest London fashion, with his hair smoothly brushed and a pearl pin in his black satin tie, Herr Selingman stood upon the threshold, beaming upon them.