“You will gain nothing by trying to make a fool of me. You carried messages for those people. The last messages you took you delivered to one of our agents.”
Her soul refused her even self-defense. She could only stammer the fact, hardly believing it as she put it forth:
“I didn’t know what was in the letters. I never knew.”
Verrinder was disgusted by such puerile defense:
“What did you think was in them, then?”
“I had no idea. Papa––Sir Joseph didn’t take me into his confidence.”
“But you knew that they were secret.”
“He told me that they were––that they were business messages––secret financial transactions.”
“Transactions in British lives––oh, they were that! And you knew it.”