instead of a cast. Apart from him, they were all good-looking, despite
the family defect; and they were all very reticent this morning. I seemed
indeed to trace the father's wariness as well as the cast in each pair of
eyes that furtively studied me.

"And your very beautiful island," I enquired, in guttural accents that
would have made me flee for the police instantly, had I been in their
shoes, "so pleasantly situated in the sea--what is its name?"

They looked a little astonished, as well they might, and then in dry
accents the father replied, "Ransay."

"Ransay?" I repeated, and then all at once I realised where I was.
Ransay was one of the northern isles of that not unknown archipelago
which at the present moment it is safer to leave unnamed. Or perhaps for
purposes of reference one may call it The Windy Isles. Somewhere in the
same archipelago, twenty or thirty miles to the south'ard, was a
particularly important naval base and I began to realise what I had
stumbled up against.

In those early days of the war one heard a great many tales of spies and
spying, but many of them were so palpably absurd and there was as yet
such a total lack of evidence to support any one of them, that I--like a
good many other people--felt sceptical of the whole thing. The
distinguished General in German pay, the well known member of the Cabinet
in hourly communication with the Kaiser, the group of German strategists
working in the cellars of a West End London mansion, and all the rest of
the early legends had made even the very moderately sensible extremely
chary of believing anything we heard. But I thought very hard and
seriously now. A real spy--seen and heard--actually living in the Isle of