"One moment!" said he, jumping up; "there's something I feel I must say. I've been rather contrite about it. I'm afraid I haven't quite played cricket so far as you are concerned."
She looked at him quickly.
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"It's about Belke. I'm afraid Phipps was quite right in saying I'm rather cold-blooded when I am keen over a job. Perhaps it becomes a little too much of a mere problem. Getting you to treat Belke as you did, for instance. You were very nice to him to-night—though he was too German to understand how you felt—and it struck me that very possibly you had been seeing a great deal of him, and he's a nice-looking fellow, with a lot of good stuff in him, a brave man, no doubt about it, and—well, perhaps you liked him enough to make you wish I hadn't let you in for such a job. I just wondered."
She looked at him for an instant with an expression he did not quite understand; then she looked away and seemed for a moment a little embarrassed, and then she looked at him again, and he thought he had never seen franker eyes.
"You're as kind and considerate as—as, well, as you're clever!" she said with a half laugh. "But, if you only knew, if you only even had the least guess how I've longed to do something for my country—something really useful, I mean; how unutterably wretched I felt when the trifling work I was doing was stopped by a miserable neglected cold and I had to have a change, and as I'd no money I had to take this stupid job of teaching; and how I envied the women who were more fortunate and really were doing useful things; oh, then you'd know how grateful I feel to you! If I could make every officer in the German navy—and the army too—fall in love with me, and then hand them over to you, I'd do it fifty times over! Don't, please, talk nonsense, or think nonsense! Good-night, Mr Tiel, and perhaps it's good-bye."
She laughed as she gave him his nom-de-guerre, and held out her hand as frankly as she had spoken. He did not take it, however.
"I'm going to escort you over to Mrs Brown's," he said with a very different expression now in his eyes.
"It's very good of you," she said; "you are sure you have time?"
"Loads!" he assured her.