"Couldn't live without her, eh?" she burst out. For the first time in Napier's experience of her there was a common tang in her tone.
He rose to his feet. "Simply, she is not going with you. I thought you might prefer to decide this yourself, or to tell her you have ascertained that the passport difficulty is insuperable; anything you like." She sat looking down on the film of handkerchief held affectedly in the thick, white hand. There was no sign of anxiety or haste in either her face or her weary attitude. "The alternative," Napier went on in a quick undertone, "is that she will be staying behind with full knowledge of all that we have up to now kept back."
She turned to him with smothered vehemence. "It never was my plan to take her. I don't know what on earth I'd do with her."
Napier repressed the jubilation crying out in his heart. "The question, as I say, is merely, will you give her up after struggle and exposure or will you do it quietly?"
She seemed to make a rapid calculation. "If I agree to this, will you promise that she shall never know what I've gone through, this last twenty-four hours?" The handkerchief went to her lips.
"No," said Napier, sternly, "but I'll promise that I won't enlighten her before you leave."
"And Mr. Grant? If you tell him, you may as well tell every one. He couldn't keep anything to save his neck."
"If you keep to the course I've laid down, I don't know any special reason for enlightening Mr. Grant." Napier knew that he was showing weakness over the point. Yet, after all, in a few hours the woman would be out of the country. Behind that wall of the German lines she would be lost.
By the time Julian returned to the sitting-room, Miss Greta had accepted the inevitable.
"I don't want to seem rude,"—she turned to Napier with her weary grace—"but I think I must ask to be left alone awhile. Perhaps you'll be so very kind as to explain to Mr. Grant that in these circumstances of family affliction"—only Napier recognized the Adelphi touch in the phrase and in the lace-bordered handkerchief pressed to heroic lips—"the more I think of it, the more I feel it would be best for me to go home alone."