"Doesn't matter!"
"Not now. Oh, don't look like that!"
She put up her hand and drew her finger-tips down across his face.
He caught at the wrist and held her while he talked very quietly. There was no trace of exultation over the "enemy" woman who had served him so ill and served his country worse. "But we can't, to salve our private feelings, leave a person of that sort—"
"Whatever she's done, you can't let her be killed, Gavan! Gavan, you can't! Not a woman who was my old friend."
"Don't!" he cried out. "It's more than I can bear to hear you calling her your friend. Of course you are horror-struck—"
"I am more than horror-struck; I'm haunted. I'll be haunted all my days unless you—O Gavan,—if you're sorry, take me out of this nightmare!" As he tried to draw her to him again, he felt her shuddering. "It isn't horror only. I've been through vileness, too. It's all clinging about me. I've seen a man making use of holy things for hideous ends. I've seen a woman broken by torture. I've seen—" She jumped up, with a hand dashed across her wet eyes—"If you can't do something, if you let Greta be shot, I shall never sleep again. I shall go mad."
"Hush! hush! Don't you see that if I were to do everything in my power, this business has gone too far? I am as helpless as you, as helpless as she."
"You can't say that till you've tried—tried everything. If you'll only try!"
Without her saying so, he felt that to have tried to save that wretched woman, even to have failed, as fail he must, would count for something. Whether it would count enough, who could say? There are games you can't play with imagination and memory. Well out of his reach, she was watching him with an intensity that held her breathless.