“Yes.”
He waved her to a chair so that he might sit down.
“Was giebt’s neues––er––what is the noose?”
“I have none. What is yours?”
“You mean you do not wish to tell. If I should commence once, I should never stop. But we are both alife yet. That is always somethink. I was never so nearly not.”
Marie Louise could not withhold the protest:
“You saved yourself by betraying your friends.”
“Well, I telled––I told only what the English knew already. If they let me go for it, it was no use to kill everybody, should I?”
He was rather miserable about it, for he could see that she despised him more for being an informer than for having something to inform. He pleaded in extenuation:
“But I shall show how usefool I can be to my country. Those English shall be sorry to let me go, and my people glad. And so shall you.”