"Ingrate!"
"Not that, by any means," he assured her heartily. "You know that I am grateful. You know that if I refuse for the moment your offer it is not because I mistrust you. I simply feel that I should be taking elaborate precautions which are quite unnecessary."
"I might even spare you," she remarked, smiling, "Lady Anne for your secretary."
"Even that inducement," he answered steadily, "does not move me."
She sighed.
"You will have your own way," she said, "and yet there is something rather sad about it. I know so much more of this Paris than you. I know so much more of Herr Freudenberg. Remember that there are a quarter of a million Germans in this city, and of that quarter of a million at least twenty thousand belong to one or the other of the secret societies with which the city abounds. All of them are different in tone, but they all have at the end of their programme the cause of the Fatherland. By this time you will have been named to them as its enemy. Twenty thousand of them, my friend, and not a scruple amongst the lot!"
He moved in his place a little restlessly.
"One does not fight in these ways nowadays," he protested.
"Pig-headed Englishman!" she murmured. "You to say that, too!"
His thoughts flashed back to those few moments of vivid life in his own rooms. He thought of Freudenberg's calm perseverance. An uncomfortable feeling seized him.