“What?”
“Get it. The treaty.”
“The treaty! From Baron Arnim! You don’t know much of diplomacy, Crabb.”
“You misunderstood me,” he said, coolly; and then, with lowered voice:
“Not from Baron Arnim—from Baron Arnim’s dispatch-box.”
Burnett looked at his acquaintance in a maze. Crabb had been thought a mystery in the old days. He was an enigma now.
“Surely you’re jesting.”
“Why? It oughtn’t to be difficult.”
Burnett looked fearfully around the room at their distant neighbors. “But it’s burglary. Worse than that. If I, in my connection with the State Department, were discovered tampering with the papers of a foreign government, it would lead to endless complications and, perhaps, the disruption of diplomatic relations. Such a thing is impossible. Its very impossibility was the one thing which prompted Crowthers’ suggestion. Can’t you understand that?”