"I'm not a traitor!... I'm not a traitor!" she whispered. "I don't know anything. I can't tell you anything." Had the hour struck? she asked herself. Was her father about to be exposed in his perfidy; was she about to step on the world's stage as the daughter of a spy, a traitor, an inciter to murder? Her brain refused to credit it. The thing was monstrous, impossible.... She had feared it, been certain of its coming, but now she denied it. It could not happen--to her.
"You must tell the truth," he said, striving to make his voice gentle. "You warned me once.... Your warning was true. If you had not known you couldn't have warned me.... You _know_."
"How did you know they were coming to my shop that night?"
"I can't tell you.... I sha'n't tell you."
"Do you love that man? Is that why you protect him?" Again the personal element was obtruding. Jealousy showed its face where there should have been only a calm desire to know the truth.
"I hate him! Oh, how I hate him!--more than anything else on earth!"
"But you are with him always ... daily. That doesn't look like hate.... A girl doesn't--" He stopped, could not say the thing, could not tell her to her face that a girl like her does not become the mistress of a man she hates.
"You don't know.... You don't understand. I can't help myself. I have to be with him. I have to, I tell you. Can't you believe me?"
"Do you know what this man is doing? Do you know your country is at war, and this man and his work are more dangerous than an army on the battlefield? Do you know that? Do you know that for years he has plotted and worked against America? That he has burned mills, dynamited bridges, stirred up labor troubles--bought and paid for murders--for Germany? You _do_ know. I know that you know.... And yet you call yourself an American and say you are no traitor.... You're as bad as he."
"You mustn't say that." Her flaming spirit was awakened to anger, an anger sending her on as headlong a course as his. "I sha'n't listen to it.... I tell you I hate him."
"Is he the man who stole Matthews's aeroplane?"
"Is he the man who plotted to blow up my workshop?"
He was silent a moment; then he said, as if dazed by the thought: "I loved you.... I could love you. I thought you were everything good and glowing in the world. I worshiped you.... It was never you I loved, but a girl who never existed, some one I mistook for you; ... some one who never could have become what you have become; ... some one who was honest, not a friend and partner of spies; ... some one who could never have been touched by squalid defilement--"