“That’s the lady, I think.”

Medina gazed at the picture with delight.  He touched his lips with his fingers, and threw a kiss to it.  His sharp, sallow face suddenly flowered into smiles.

“Yes.  What a woman!  She has real intelligence,” he exclaimed fervently.

Jose Medina was in the habit of losing his heart and keeping his head a good many times in an ordinary year.

“It’s an extraordinary thing,” Martin Hillyard remarked, “that however intelligent they are, not one of these young ladies can resist the temptation to have her portrait taken in Moorish dress at the photographer’s in the Alhambra.”

Jose Medina saw nothing at all grotesque or ridiculous in this particular foible.

“They make such charming pictures,” he cried.

“And it is very useful for us, too,” remarked Hillyard.  “The photographer is a friend of mine.”

Jose was still gazing at the photograph.

“Such a brain, my friend!  She never told a story the second time differently, however emotional the moment.  She never gave away a secret.”

“She probably didn’t know any,” said Hillyard.

But Jose would not hear of such a reason.

“Oh, yes!  She has great influence.  She knows people in Berlin—­great people.  She is their friend, and I cannot wonder.  What an intelligence!”

Martin Hillyard laughed.

“She seems to have fairly put it over you at any rate,” he said.  He was not alarmed at Jose Medina’s fervour.  For he knew that remarkable man’s capacity for holding his tongue even in the wildest moments of his temporary passions.  But he took the photograph away from Medina and locked it up again.  The rapturous reminiscences of Rosa Hahn’s intelligence checked the flow of that story which was to lead him to B45.

“So you know about her?” Jose said with an envious eye upon the locked drawer.

“A little,” said Martin Hillyard.

Rosa Hahn was a clerk in the office of the Hamburg-Amerika Line before the war, and in the Spanish Department.  She was sent to Spain in the last days of July, 1914, upon Government work, and at a considerable salary, which she enjoyed.  She seemed indeed to have done little else, and Berlin, after a year, began to complain.  Berlin had a lower opinion of both her social position and her brains than Jose Medina had formed.  Berlin needed results, and failing to obtain them, proceeded to hint more and more definitely that Rosa had better return to her clerk’s stool in Hamburg.  Rosa, however, had been intelligent enough to make friends with one or two powerful Germans in Spain; and they pleaded for her with this much success.  She was given another three months within which period she must really do something to justify her salary.  So much Martin Hillyard already knew; he learnt now that Jose Medina had provided the great opportunity.  To snatch him with his two hundred motor feluccas and his eighteen thousand men from the English—­here was something really worth doing.