She told Darby when he came over and stood leaning on his sticks, looking down at her as she lay back in a chair. He heard it all.
Some things he knew already.
"They were watching some strange car," Stafford tells me, "which Guinane met out on the Dublin road at nights, and they've got that and Guinane, and the 'U' boat—the patrol boat caught her."
Gheena said "It was not a bad haul," a little tremulously; also that she would like to send her love to the Admiral.
Darby looked at her for quite a long time.
"And you took Basil for a spy," he said slowly. "Of course, egged on by the real one. And you've been in terrible danger, Gheena."
Gheena replied briefly that she had thought of it first herself, without any egging.
"I always said he wasn't the sort for a spy." Darby put his hand on Gheena's shoulder. With a little wry smile he felt her shrink. "Now we'll go to see him," he said cheerily—"you and I, Gheena, at once."
Limping behind her light quiet movements as they went to the car, laying his sticks aside as he got in; the wry smile clung to his lips as they drove to Mrs. Maloney's, where a faint reek of disinfectants wafted to them through the door. Basil Stafford, very white, was sitting in a big chair.
"Bullet touched up the old wound," he said. "And you'll stay to tea with me, won't you?" He avoided looking at Gheena.