perhaps, too, of character, for Galahads are not so common but that
ordinary folk must needs draw courage from their example and put
something of a blind trust in their tenfold strength.

To reduce a romantic ideal to a working plan is a very difficult
thing.

'We shall have to argue backwards,' I said. 'What is to be the final
stage? Because that must govern the others.'

There was only one answer--to get Dollmann, secrets and all, daughter
and all, away from Germany altogether. So only could we satisfy the
double aim we had set before us. What a joy it is, when beset with
doubts, to find a bed-rock necessity, however unattainable! We
fastened on this one and reasoned back from it. The first lesson was
that, however many and strong were the enemies we had to contend
with, our sole overt fee must be Dollmann. The issue of the struggle
must be known only to ourselves and him. If we won, and found out
'what he was at', we must at all costs conceal our success from his
German friends, and detach him from them before he was compromised.
(You will remark that to blithely accept this limitation showed a
very sanguine spirit in us.) The next question, how to find out what
he was at, was a deal more thorny. If it had not been for the
discovery of Dollmann's identity, we should have found it as hard a
nut to crack as ever. But this discovery was illuminating. It threw
into relief two methods of action which hitherto we had been hazily
seeking to combine, seesawing between one and the other, each of us
influenced at different times by different motives. One was to rely
on independent research; the other to extort the secret from Dollmann
direct, by craft or threats. The moral of to-day was to abandon the