"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?"