“But what chance would I have of reaching him? I should merely be laughed at if I asked to see him!”
“Not if you asked in the right way,” and again she hesitated. Then she pressed still closer. “Listen—I have no right to tell you what I am about to tell you, and yet I must. Do you remember at Aix, I looked at you like this?” and she caught her lower lip for an instant between the thumb and little finger of her left hand.
“Yes, I remember; and you burst into tears immediately afterward.”
“That was because you did not understand. If, in answer, you had passed your left hand across your eyes, I should have said, in French, ‘Have we not met before?’ and if you had replied, ‘In Berlin, on the twenty-second,’ I should have known that you were one of ours. Those passwords will take you to General Joffre himself.”
“Let us repeat them,” Stewart suggested. In a moment he knew them thoroughly. “And that’s all right!” he said.
“You consent, then?” she asked, eagerly.
“To assist you in every way possible—yes.”
“To leave me, if I am not able to go on; to take the letters and press on alone,” she insisted, her eyes shining. “Promise me, my friend!”
“I shall have to be governed by circumstances,” said Stewart, cautiously. “If that seems the best thing to do—why, I’ll do it, of course. But I warn you that this enterprise would soon go to pieces if it had no better wits than mine back of it. Why, in the few minutes they were searching you back there at the station, I walked straight into a trap—and with my eyes wide open, too—at the very moment when I was proudly thinking what a clever fellow I was!”
“What was the trap?” she asked, quickly.