"Don't say names, will you? I do so hate being told what I'm not meant to know."
"If I don't tell somebody I shall burst," said Lady Wereminster. "You're safe. You're a well; people pour their souls into you, and other people lean over from the brink and see nothing. It appears that various small matters have leaked out lately in the Press, and no one can account for the authorship. And in each case, unluckily, the impression given has been true. So far only comparatively minor matters have been disclosed; but who knows when something really important won't be given away before its time, and so lead to irreparable harm? I know, as a fact, that the P.O. is worried about it."
"How long has this been going on?"
"Six or eight months. That's the unfortunate part of it. It dates back to the time when Richard Farquharson was made Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. Oh, don't look like that—nobody suspects him, but it's an unlucky incident. Why, even his appointment, which was, so far as we know, known only to the King and his immediate household, to the Prime Minister and to the personnel who met at Mr. Calvert's famous dinner party on the second of November, was announced in all the morning papers, although Mr. Beadon had expressly told us that it was to be kept private for the next forty-eight hours."
"Mr. Beadon has new secretaries, I suppose," said Evelyn. "He would probably require more help as Prime Minister than as Leader of the Opposition."
"Oh, they're above reproach," said Lady Wereminster; "personal friends mostly, and all men who have worked with him for years. Besides, it's not necessarily John Beadon's news that has been given away. It is chiefly minute turns of the tide which affect the rise and fall of shares, etc. Anyway, the whole position is discomforting, a source of real annoyance to the Prime Minister and his colleagues."
"Stocks and shares," repeated Evelyn. She had grown very pale. "Yes, of course an intimate knowledge of foreign affairs would make all the difference in speculation. But no one, however base, could do such a thing—no one in our set, I mean——" She faltered.
"Some men and women would do anything for money," said Lady Wereminster. "What's happened so far does not affect the nation en grand. It's merely that events have proved that small founts of knowledge, whose source is supposed to be only known to the initiated, have obviously been tapped by some mysterious person, whose identity is as yet unknown. And as these things deal mainly with his office they look like stabs in the dark aimed at Mr. Farquharson himself. Such a man must have enemies, of course, but I never knew—did you?—that any special person bore him a grudge?"
"I want to ask you a question," said Evelyn. Her husband found her in the hall, awaiting him, when, some time after midnight, he turned the key in the door. "You have been comparatively generous to me lately. So far as I know, our income is the same as it has always been, but you have been less troubled about money matters. Why?"
Brand put one hand on her shoulder heavily, and with the other dragged her face sharply upwards into the full glare of the electric light, and looked at her searchingly.