"Excuse me, Mrs. Arne, but there are other subjects we can discuss more profitably."
"As you please. The subject has no interest for me; but I may explain that I purposely went to Mrs. Dacre's in the capacity of a dressmaker, that I might answer Mrs. Carson's inquiry from a good address. I was determined that she should engage Clara."
"As a spy?"
"Yes," admitted the woman, nonchalantly, "as a spy. It was necessary that I should have Carson watched."
"But your spy has betrayed you?"
"So much the worse for her. She shall die. How or when I have not yet determined."
Mallow shuddered. The woman repelled him. There was something uncanny in her bare statement of fact. Even a suggestion of the melodramatic would have relieved her assertion of its sheer brutality. But there was not a tinge of it. She merely stated that the girl should be killed, and went on knitting.
"You are not used to these things," she continued; "death is as nothing to us. To kill or to be killed, we are always ready."
"Have you no fear?" gasped Mallow.
"Of the law? No."