"The papers don't seem to have come," Napier answered.
"Not come! I wonder why!" She listened while he explained, in the easy British fashion, "that now and then the fella at the Junction would forget to throw the papers out."
"And you stand that? Sir William doesn't get the man dismissed?"
"What the devil...!" Sir William broke out. Apparently there were things which Sir William could not stand! One of them was in the letter he held as he went fuming toward the library, with Napier at his heels.
"Shut the door! Look here. The fact of that confidential memorandum being in the hands of the British Government is known. Known in the Hamburg shipping center, of all things! Here, you see what they say." Sir William thrust under the eyes of his secretary the highly disconcerting letter he had just received from the Board of Trade. "Well--? It certainly didn't happen in _my_ department. Damned impudence!" Sir William burst out, "to suppose that any of _our_ people...." He glared at an invisible cross-examiner, "It's never been out of our hands!"
"Except," Napier threw in, "to come into the translator's."
"Translator!" his chief echoed pettishly. Sir William, like many men not at home in foreign languages, quite particularly objected to being reminded of the fact. "Translator! They aren't worrying about the translator. It's what you're here for."
"I wasn't the translator of that particular document. You gave it to Miss von Schwarzenberg to do."
"To be sure! But remembering that doesn't help us."
"Come, come!" said Sir William. "It's annoying to have secret information go astray, but it needn't warp our common sense."
Napier's duty, as he saw it, to try to turn his chief's mind toward a possible culprit under his own roof was discounted at the start, as the younger man well knew, by Sir William's chivalrous view of women. That wasn't really what was the matter with his view, but that was the name it went by. Sir William had married his butterfly lady for her painted wings. Finding but little underneath the blue and golden dust, he loyally concluded that the only difference between Lady McIntyre and other men's wives was a difference in the hue and the degree of their gold and blue--or their leaden and dun, as the case might be.