“Yes.”
“And for your own?”
“Yes; and for my own.”
He leaned nearer: “Yet you’re taking a chance on your own honour to-night.”
She blushed brightly: “I didn’t think I was taking a very great chance with you.”
He said: “You have found life too hard. And when you faced failure in New York you began to let go of life—real life, I mean. And you came up here to-night wondering whether you had courage to let yourself go. When I spoke to you it scared you. You found you hadn’t the courage. But perhaps to-morrow you might find it—or next week—if sufficiently scared by hunger—you might venture to take the first step along the path that you say others usually take sooner or later.”
The girl flushed scarlet, sat looking at him out of eyes grown dark with anger.
He said: “You told me an untruth. You have been tempted to betray your country. You have resisted. You have been threatened with death. You have had courage to defy threats and temptations where your country’s honour was concerned!”
“How do you know?” she demanded.
He continued, ignoring the question: “From the time you landed in San Francisco you have been threatened. You tried to earn a living by your magician’s tricks, but in city after city, as you came East, your uneasiness grew into fear, and your fear into terror, because every day more terribly confirmed your belief that people were following you determined either to use you to their own purposes or to murder you——”