"Just as you take it. You were a self-willed little beggar, anyhow. Do you remember how shocked your mother was that night at the Grahams, when you came on their little stage as a boy?"
"I do, indeed. Poor mother! She must have been awfully worried by all this; and is still, of course. But Rosa has written to a friend in Switzerland and asked her to wire that I'm all right; and perhaps by this time she's had the message. It's horribly wicked, I suppose, but I declare I feel so vindictive that I could almost kill that woman Gretchen and von Erstein too, when I think of what they've made poor mother suffer by stopping my letters."
"He's a low-down swine; and if I get half a chance, I'll even things up with him before we leave. But we don't want to talk about him now. If your mother's got that wire, she'll feel heaps better. Now, tell me what you think of my third wheel?"
She paused and the colour crept slowly into her face, robbing it of the worried anxiety which had so distressed me and making her as bewitchingly pretty as ever in my eyes. "If you will have the truth I'd--I'd like the third wheel better than either of the others."
"Same here; but it wouldn't be so safe. We'll have the props with us, however, in case of mishaps. What say you?"
"Carried unanimously," she cried enthusiastically. "It would be lovely!"
"You haven't changed much, then, even with all this."
"Not much there, even; but I meant in the tomboy business."
"Ah, you don't know. I have changed. I've grown up, suddenly. It couldn't be otherwise," she answered very seriously. "At one time it looked a certainty that I should be sent to gaol, and the suspense was--well, almost unbearable. No one can tell what it meant to have to appear indifferent and confident, when I knew that any moment might be my last in freedom. That danger seemed to pass away, but only to give way to worse."
"Yes," she broke in with a quick nod. "I can't bear even to hear his name mentioned. I soon knew what his real object was; he has a friend, a man like himself, who is in command of one of the concentration camps: the one at Krustadt: and--but you can guess. There was only one thing for me to do, and I prepared for it. I have the poison upstairs."