he help of his fellow-countrymen. I told him that I knew the world,
and was willing to undertake work of any sort. He answered that such
cases were usually looked after at the consulate, and advised me to go
there. But I didn't give him up, at once. I told him I was
resourceful, and experienced, and might undertake even minor official
tasks for him, until I had heard from my husband. Then he hesitated a
little, and asked me if I knew the Continent well, and if I was averse
to traveling alone. Then he called somebody up on his telephone, and
in a few minutes came out and shook his head doubtfully, and advised me
to apply at the consulate. Instead of that, I went not to the English,
but to the American consul first. He told me that in five weeks a
sea-captain friend of his was sailing from Havre to New York, and that
it might not be impossible to have me carried along."

"That's what they always say!"

"It was the best he could do. Then I went to the British consul. He
spoke about references, which left me blank; and tried to pump me,
which left me frightened. But he could do nothing, he told me, except
in the way of a personal donation, and that, he assumed, was out of the
question. So I went back to the Embassy once more. I don't know why,
but this time, for some reason or other, the ambassador believed in me.
He gave me a week's trial as a sort of second deputy private secretary,
indexing three-year-old correspondence and copying Roumanian
agricultural reports. Then he put me on ordinance-report work. Then
something happened--I can't go into details now--to arouse my
suspicions. I rummaged through the storage closet in my temporary
office and looped his telephone wire with twenty feet of number twelve
wire from a broken electric fan, and an unused transmitter. Then,
scrap by scrap, I picked up my first inklings of what was at that
moment worrying the Foreign Office and the people at the Embassy as
well. It was the capture of the Gibraltar specifications by Prince
Slevenski Pobloff. When a Foreign Office secret agent telephoned in
that Pobloff had been seen in Nice, I fought against the temptation for
half a day, then I went straight to the ambassador and told him what I
knew, but not how I came to know it. He gave me two hundred francs and
a ticket to Monte Carlo, with a letter to deliver in Rome, if by any
chance I should succeed."

"That would give us the show we want! _That_ would give us a ch