“Oh, I am only a perplexed woman,” she said, laughing. “I do so long for the freedom of all the world, absolute individual liberty and no law but that best of all laws—the law of the unselfish.”
We had stopped, by a mutual impulse, at the head of the stone stairway.
“Why do you shelter such a man as John Buckhurst?” I asked, abruptly.
She raised her eyes to me with perfect composure.
“Why do you ask?”
“Because I have come here from Paris to arrest him.”
She bent her head thoughtfully and laid the tips of her fingers on the sculptured balustrade.
“To me,” she said, “there’s no such thing as a political crime.”
“It is not for a political crime that we want John Buckhurst,” I said, watching her. “It is for a civil outrage.”
Her face was like marble; her hands tightened on the fretted carving. 48