And that man was, I reflected, the head of a horde of secret agents which the German War Office had flung upon our eastern coast. To expose and crush them all was surely the patriotic duty of any Englishman.
The magnificent old mansion with its splendid paintings, its antique furniture, its armour, its bric-à-brac, old silver, and splendid heirlooms of the Edgcotts rang with the laughter of the assembly as two young subalterns indulged in humorous horse-play.
The appearance of the old sphinx-like family butler, however, compelled us to leave our point of observation, and for an hour I strolled with William out in the park in the balmy moonlight of the summer night.
"There'll be a sensation before long," declared the valet to me. "You watch."
"In what way?" I inquired, with curiosity.
"Wait and see," he laughed, as though he possessed knowledge of what was intended.
Next day I drove my master and the German Colonel over to Nottingham, where we put up for an hour at the Black Boy Hotel. This struck me as curious, for I recollected that William had been sent down from London with a message to some person named Raven staying at that hotel.
All the way from Edgcott, through Oakham, Melton Mowbray, and Trent, I had endeavoured to catch some of the conversation between the pair in the car behind me. The noise and rattle, however, prevented me from overhearing much, but the stray sentences which did reach me when I slowed down to change my speeds showed them to be on the most friendly terms.
Evidently the spy was entirely unsuspicious of his friend.
At the hotel, after I had put up the car, I saw my master and the German speaking with a tall, thin, consumptive-looking man in black, whose white tie showed him to be a dissenting minister. He was clean-shaven, aged fifty, and had an unusually protruding chin.
All three went out together and walked along the street chatting. When they had gone I went back into the yard, and on inquiry found that the minister was the Reverend Richard Raven, of the Baptist Missionary Society.
He had been a missionary in China, and had addressed several meetings in Nottingham and the neighbourhood on behalf of the society.
Why, I wondered, had Bob Brackenbury, so essentially a man about town, come there to consult a Baptist missionary, and accompanied, too, by the man he was scheming to unmask?