Atlanta Daily World

"Can't say any of us are. We have been drifting so long, though, that any decisive action will seem to be sensational."

"You think there will be war, sir?"

Matresser answered like a man whose thoughts were in some far-away place.

"One's fancies go for nothing at such a time. They spring up in the mind like weeds and pass with the ticking of the clock. Something is going to happen, Henry. That I am sure of. I could feel the shiver of excitement all over Europe last time I came back. What does happen will depend upon such a small decision--a tremor in Downing Street tonight, a mind that turns the wrong way in Berlin tomorrow. Anything might do it, Henry. And what a war!"

Matresser had walked to the broad window at the further end of the apartment looking across the Park. All was darkness as he stood there absorbed.

"Tell me the time, Henry," he asked without turning round.

"Five minutes to eleven."

Matresser left the window and walked down the room toward the small round table on which the telephone stood.

"I feel so foolishly futile," he confided, "shut up here in a locked room talking to myself, trying to keep calm--and yet believe me, Henry, I am aching to overwhelm those bloody-minded, slobbering so-called men of letters who sit ready to launch their flaming phrases and raucous rhetoric. They have got it all cut-and-dried. 'Not one yard of our beloved Empire, won by those who gave body and soul for their country, shall be parted with'".

The clock began to strike the hour. Matresser was suddenly silent. His severe mood had left him. He stood close to Yates, whose eyes were fixed upon the telephone instrument. Before the last stroke of the clock the message came.

"Norwich speaking. London in on the line."

Matresser gripped the receiver which had been handed to him.

"Matresser this end," he said calmly.

It was Sir Francis' voice, husky with emotion.

"We have won, Matresser," he announced.

"Magnificent!"

Sir Francis' voice came for a moment shrill and then again hoarse.

"At a great cost. Everyone seems stupefied. The room is like a battlefield strewn with the corpses of mangled phrases and mortally wounded hopes. Destroy your telephone connection. Leave with the dawn, or before, if the moonlight helps. Your pilot will know."

Then silence.

Matresser took up a huge pair of scissors from the desk and cut the green telephone cord. His voice seemed suddenly inspired. Yates stared at him in amazement.

"Official orders. Henry. Time now for anyone to change their minds. It is only five minutes past eleven: You have sent everything to the plane?"

"Everything."

Matresser's fingers were already upon the handle of the door when the crash came. The casement of the French window fell inwards, smashed through the curtain and the carpet was covered with splintered glass. A man in blue overalls, his face bleeding, staggered into the room.

"You must come to help," he cried in German. "They will kill our pilot! I myself am shot!"

(To be continued)

Copyright, 1938, by Little, Brown & Co.