“How much? She’s rather hard-up, I hear.”
“Women like her are always hard-up,” growled old Sam. “Leave it to me. I’ll get Rolfe to send her something to-morrow.”
“I promised her a couple of hundred. You mustn’t send her less, or we shall queer business for the future.”
“I shall send her five hundred,” responded the head of the firm. “She’s a very useful woman—and pretty, too, Ben—by Jove! she is! She called on me in her automobile at the Elysée Palace about eighteen months ago, and I was much struck by her. She knows almost everybody in Paris, and can get any information she wants from her numerous male admirers.”
“She’s well paid—gets a thousand a year from us,” Ben remarked.
“And we sometimes make twenty out of the secret information she obtains for us,” laughed old Sam. “Remember the Morocco business, and how she gave us the complete French programme which she got from young Delorme, at the Quai d’Orsay. We were as much in the dark as the newspapers till then, and if we hadn’t have got at the French intentions, we should have made a terribly heavy loss. As it was, we left it to others—who went under.”
“She got an extra five hundred as a present for that,” Ben pointed out.
“And it was worth it.”
“Delorme doesn’t know who gave the game away to us. If he did, it would be the worse for Her Daintiness.”
“No doubt it would. But she’s a fly bird, and as only you and I and Rolfe know the truth, she’s pretty confident that she’ll never be given away.”