"Why, yes. I can. But—I am not sure what your attitude——"
"It is friendly," he said, looking at her. "I am perfectly hap—I mean willing to listen to you. Only, sooner or later, you must return to me those papers."
"Why?"
"The Governor entrusted them to me officially——"
She said smiling: "But you—your Governor I mean—can frame another similar bill."
"I'm a soldier in uniform," he said dramatically. "My duty is to guard those papers with my life!"
"I am a soldier, too," she said proudly, "in the Army of Human Progress."
"Very well," he said, "if you regard it that way."
"I do. Only brute violence can deprive me of these papers."
"That," he said, "is out of the question."