It wasn't at all what Greta had intended. She looked at the girl.
"A person like me," she said, with an effort at that high air of old,—oh, the piteous travesty!—"a person like me, who is supposed to know too much, if she doesn't pay with her life—it isn't always the fault of the people she works for."
"I don't understand," Nan breathed.
"Probably not. We ourselves don't 'understand' till it's too late. What idea had I, when I began, that every hour of my life I should be saying: 'Is it to-day? Will it be to-morrow I shall go under?' We mostly do go under when we've served our turn."
There was the ghost of the old satisfaction in the marred face as she read in the young one how well the old trick worked. "Be very sure it isn't our enemies we fear most. It's those you call our friends."
"You can't"—Nan gasped—"you can't mean the German authorities who—ask to have these things done?"
"Oh, can't I?" She positively revived before her manifest success. "One of my own friends was let in for an English prison by a German agent acting under orders from the Wilhelmstrasse. My friend hasn't come out. He never will come out. Two others I knew, one a woman, made the mistake of knowing too much, and paid the penalty."
"The penalty!" whispered the other.
"They"—Greta stared in front of her—"they disappeared." Her fixed eyes moved. They came back to Nan. "You imagine my friends were set against a prison wall and had their account settled by an English firing squad? Oh, no! We in the service"—with the old arrogance she threw back her head, crowned by the horrible cap—"we know we have no such need to fear any foreign power as we have to fear our own."
Nan failed lamentably to respond to this form of professional pride. "It's a ghastly trade."