“They are not likely to find one,” she answered, “unless I help them.”
“Say, Penelope,” he exclaimed, “you are not in earnest?”
“I am,” she assured him. “It is exactly as I say. I believe I am one of the few people who could put the police upon the right track.”
“Is there any reason why you shouldn’t?” he asked.
“That’s just what I can’t make up my mind about,” she told him. “However, I have brought you out with me expecting to hear something, and I am going to tell you this. That last time he came to England—the time he went to St. Petersburg and twice to Berlin—he came on government business.”
The young man looked, for a moment, incredulous.
“Are you sure of that, Pen?” he asked. “It doesn’t sound like our people, you know, does it?”
“I am quite sure,” she declared confidently. “You are a very youthful diplomat, Dicky, but even you have probably heard of governments who employ private messengers to carry despatches which for various reasons they don’t care to put through their embassies.”
“Why, that’s so, of course, over on this side,” he agreed. “These European nations are up to all manner of tricks. But I tell you frankly, Pen, I never heard of anything of the sort being done from Washington.”
“Perhaps not,” she answered composedly. “You see, things have developed with us during the last twenty-five years. The old America had only one foreign policy, and that was to hold inviolate the Monroe doctrine. European or Asiatic complications scarcely even interested her. Those times have passed, Dicky. Cuba and the Philippines were the start of other things. We are being drawn into the maelstrom. In another ten years we shall be there, whether we want to be or not.”