"Oh, you've heard of him, too, then?" said he.
And she said, still in her low voice, "I--saw him once."
"Well," declared young Benham, "it's beyond me. I give it up. You never can tell about people, can you? I guess they'll all go wrong when there's enough in it to make it worth while. That's what old Charlie always says. He says most people are straight enough when there's nothing in it, but make the pot big enough and they'll all go crooked."
The young man's face turned suddenly hard and old and bitter.
"Gee! I ought to know that well enough, oughtn't I?" he said. "I guess nobody knows that better than I do after what happened to me.... Come along and take a walk in the garden, Maud! I'm sick of sitting still."
Mlle. Coira O'Hara looked up with a start, as if she had not been listening, but she rose when the boy held out his hand to her, and the two went down from the terrace and moved off toward the west.
Ste. Marie watched them until they had disappeared among the trees, and then turned on his back, staring up into the softly stirring canopy of green above him and the little rifts of bright blue sky. He did not understand at all. Something mysterious had crept in where all had seemed so plain to the eye. Certain words that young Arthur Benham had spoken repeated themselves in his mind, and he could not at once make them out. Assuredly there was something mysterious here.
In the first place, what did the boy mean by "dirty work"? To be sure, spying, in its usual sense, is not held to be one of the noblest of occupations, but--in such a cause as this! It was absurd, ridiculous, to call it "dirty work." And what did he mean by the words which he had used afterward? Ste. Marie did not quite follow the idiom about the "big enough pot," but he assumed that it referred to money. Did the young fool think he was being paid for his efforts? That was ridiculous, too.
The boy's face came before him as it had looked with that sudden hard and bitter expression. What did he mean by saying that no one knew the crookedness of humanity under money temptation better than he knew it after something that had happened to him? In a sense his words were doubtless very true. Captain Stewart--and he must have been "old Charlie"; Ste. Marie remembered that the name was Charles--O'Hara, and O'Hara's daughter stood excellent examples of that bit of cynicism, but obviously the boy had not spoken in that sense--certainly not before Mlle. O'Hara! He meant something else, then. But what--what?