The Master of Stair smiled.
“You are very confident, my fair Jacobite,” he said disdainfully. “Those papers were not lightly got—”
She lifted her eyes with more steadiness.
“No,” she said, “you paid deep enough for them, did you not, Sir John Dalrymple? You stopped at nothing.”
“I do for my cause what you do for yours,” he answered coldly. “And this time I win.”
“Still I have come to ask you to give me back those papers.”
“You are astonishingly simple,” said the Master of Stair.
“So you have found me—have you not?” she answered wildly, “a very fool, Sir John Dalrymple, to follow once the very careless lifting of your finger, and fool enough now to think you have some honor—some feeling—some pity for what you have so wantonly destroyed. Those papers stand for the lives—the honor—of thousands, and you stole them.”
She put her hand to her side and came a step forward.
“By all the lies you told me,” she said, “give back to me what you stole.”