She lifted her eyes: “I’d try not to betray my country,” she murmured.
“Try to face death for your country’s honour?”
He leaned nearer: “Yet you’re taking a chance on your own honour to-night.”
She blushed brightly: “I didn’t think I was taking a very great chance with you.”
He said: “You have found life too hard. And when you faced failure in New York you began to let go of life—real life, I mean. And you came up here to-night wondering whether you had courage to let yourself go. When I spoke to you it scared you. You found you hadn’t the courage. But perhaps to-morrow you might find it—or next week—if sufficiently scared by hunger—you might venture to take the first step along the path that you say others usually take sooner or later.”
The girl flushed scarlet, sat looking at him out of eyes grown dark with anger.
He said: “You told me an untruth. You _have_ been tempted to betray your country. You have resisted. You _have_ been threatened with death. You _have_ had courage to defy threats and temptations where your country’s honour was concerned!”
He continued, ignoring the question: “From the time you landed in San Francisco you have been threatened. You tried to earn a living by your magician’s tricks, but in city after city, as you came East, your uneasiness grew into fear, and your fear into terror, because every day more terribly confirmed your belief that people were following you determined either to use you to their own purposes or to murder you——”
The girl turned quite white and half rose in her chair, then sank back, staring at him out of dilated eyes. Then Cleves smiled: “So you’ve got the nerve to do Government work,” he said, “and you’ve got the intelligence, and the knowledge, and something else—I don’t know exactly what to call it—Skill? Dexterity? Sorcery?” he smiled—“I mean your professional ability. That’s what I want—that bewildering dexterity of yours, to help your own country in the fight of its life. Will you enlist for service?”
“Yes.... Are you ready to leave this place? I want to talk to you.”
“I’ll go to your rooms with you,” she said. She added very calmly that she was glad it was to be his rooms and not some other man’s.
Out of countenance, he demanded what she meant, and she said quite candidly that she’d made up her mind to live at any cost, and that if she couldn’t make an honest living she’d make a living anyway.