'Now let us have the little note-book,' said Sir Walter.
It took us a good hour to work through it. I explained the cypher, and he was jolly quick at picking it up. He emended my reading of it on several points, but I had been fairly correct, on the whole. His face was very grave before he had finished, and he sat silent for a while.
'I don't know what to make of it,' he said at last.'He is right about one thing—what is going to happen the day after tomorrow. How the devil can it have got known? That is ugly enough in itself. But all this about war and the Black Stone—it reads like some wild melodrama. If only I had more confidence in Scudder's judgement. The trouble about him was that he was too romantic. He had the artistic temperament,and wanted a story to be better than God meant it to be. He had a lot of odd biases, too. Jews, for example,made him see red. Jews and the high finance.