"If you think I'll believe a word against my brother—especially from a self-confessed spy—"
"No?" said Gavin. "And you're just as sure of Rodney Hade's noble uprightness as of your brother's?"
"I'm not defending Rodney Hade," said Claire. "He is nothing to me, one way or the other. He—"
"Pardon me," interposed Brice. "He is a great deal to you.
You hate him and you are in mortal fear of him."
"If you spied that out, too—"
"I did," he admitted. "I did it, in the half-minute I saw you and him together, last evening. I saw a look in your eyes—I heard a tone in your voice—as you turned to introduce me to him—that told me all I needed to know. And, incidentally, it made me want to smash him. Apart from that—well, the Department knows a good deal about Rodney Hade. And it suspects a great deal more. It knows, among minor things, that he schemed to make Milo Standish plunge so heavily on certain worthless stocks that Standish went broke and in desperation raised a check of Hade's (and did it rather badly, as Hade had foreseen he would, when he set the trap)—in order to cover his margins. It—"
"No!" she cried, in wrathful refusal to believe. "That is not true. It can't be true! It is a—"
"Hade holds a mortgage on everything Standish owns," resumed Brice, "and he has held that raised check over him as a prison-menace. He—"
"Stop!" demanded Claire, ablaze with righteous indignation. "If you have such charges to make against my brother, are you too much of a coward to come to his house with me, now, and make them to his face? Are you?"
"No," he said, without a trace of unwillingness or of bravado.
"I am not. I'll go there, with you, gladly. In the meantime—"