oubled concern, of unspoken
pity, that crept over her face; and he turned away brusquely.

She spoke his name, quietly; and his gaze coasted round to her again.
She watched him with wide and hungry eyes.

Her breast heaved, at his silence, but all she said was: "Is it safe,
Jim?"

"Yes, it's perfectly safe. So tell me what you have to say. It
doesn't mean any greater risk. We would only have to come back
again--for I've work to do in this room yet!"

The return of the light seemed to give a new cast of practicality to
his thoughts.

"What sort of work?" his wife was asking him.

"Seventeen hundred napoleons in gold to find," he answered grimly.

"Oh, it's not that, not _that_!" she said, starting up. "It's the
papers, the Gibraltar papers!"

"Papers?" he repeated wonderingly.

"Yes, the imperial specifications. Pobloff's a paid agent in the
French secret service. They say he was the man who secured Kitchener's
Afghanistan frontier plans, and in some way or other had a good deal to
do with the Curzon resignation."

"Ah, I _thought_ there was something behind our _boyard_!"

"A year ago last March he was arrested in Jamaica, by the British
authorities, for securing secret photographs of the Port Royal
fortifications. They court-martialed one of the non-commissioned
officers for helping him get an admission to the fortress, but the
officer shot himself, and Pobloff had the plates spirited away, so the
case fell through. Now he's got duplicates of every Upper Gallery and
every new fortification of the Rock at Gibraltar."

"But why waste time over these things?"

"Pobloff got them through an English officer's wife. She was weak--and
worse--she lost her head over him. I can't tell you more now. But
there is an order for five hundred pounds waiting for me at the British
Embassy, in Rome, from the Foreign Office, if I secure those papers!"

"That's twenty-five hundred dollars?"

"Yes, almost."

"And I was on the point of crawling away with a few napoleons!" said
Durkin in a whisper. He began to succumb to the intoxication of this
rapidity of movement which life was once more taking on. He was
speed-mad, like a motorist on a white and lonely road. Yet an
ever-recurring dismay and distrust of the end kept coming to him.

"But how did you come to find all this out? What happened after the
rue de Sevres?"

"Oh, it was all easy and natural enough, if I could only put it into
words. After a few