II: In Which We Meet Two New AlliesI DON'T pretend for a moment, of course, that there was the slightest excuse to be offered for us. Manifestly the matter was no business of ours. If Mr. Granger chose to barricade his house with iron spikes it was his affair, and no one else's. Still I regret to say that there are people in this world who are as irresistibly drawn to a thick–ear atmosphere as a cat is to a saucer of milk. And Hugh Drummond was one of them, having been born that way.
In that way he differed from me: I only acquired the liking by force of his example. And I am bound to admit that had I been the one to see a red and blue light flashing on Romney Marsh, and realised that such a harmless, even peculiar phenomenon produced terror in the breast of my next–door neighbour, I shou
