I must put you wise about some things.' He lay back in his rubbed leather armchair and yarned for twenty minutes.

He told me how at the beginning of the war Scotland Yard had had a pretty complete register of enemy spies, and without making any fuss had just tidied them away.

After that, the covey having been broken up, it was a question of picking off stray birds.

That had taken some doing.

There had been all kinds of inflammatory stuff around, Red Masons and international anarchists, and, worst of all, international finance-touts, but they had mostly been ordinary cranks and rogues, the tools of the Boche agents rather than agents themselves.