right, I know, but I should hate to feel afterwards, if anything went wrong, that you thought I had buttered you up in order to entice you into taking the job on!” 

 Desmond took two or three deep puffs of his cigarette and dropped it into the ash-tray. 

 “I’ll see you!” he said. 

 The Chief grinned with delight. 

 “By Jove!” he exclaimed, “I knew you were my man!” 

 

CHAPTER VII. NUR-EL-DIN

 The love of romance is merely the nobler form of curiosity. And there was something in Desmond Okewood’s Anglo-Irish parentage that made him fiercely inquisitive after adventure. In him two men were constantly warring, the Irishman, eager for romance yet too indolent to go out in search of it, and the Englishman, cautious yet intensely vital withal, courting danger for danger’s sake. 

 All his ill-humor of the morning at being snatched away from his work in France had evaporated. In the Chief he now saw only the magician who was about to unlock to him the realms of Adventure. Desmond’s eyes shone with excitement as the other, obviously simmering with satisfaction, lit another cigarette and began to speak. 

 “The British public, Okewood,” he said, hitching his chair closer, “would like to see espionage in this country rendered impossible. Such an ideal state of things is, unfortunately out of the question. Quite on the contrary, this country of ours is honeycombed with spies. So it will ever be, as long as we have to work with natural means: at present we have no caps of invisibility or magician’s carpets available. 

 “As we cannot hope to kill the danger, we do our best to scotch it. Personally, my modest ambition is to make espionage as difficult as possible for the enemy by knowing as many as possible of his agents and their channels of communication, and by keeping him happy with small results, to prevent him from finding out the really important things, the disclosure of which would inevitably compromise our national safety.” 

 He paused and Desmond nodded. 

 “The extent of our business,” the Chief resumed, “is so large, the issues at stake so vital, that we at the top have to ignore the non-essentials 

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