He gave an assenting sign. “In pursuance of duty, which is, happily, mine no longer.”
“Spy!”
“I have been, I blush to confess, for a few hours,” he admitted, with a sigh and a rueful face; “but that, you may trust me, is over. The dark cloak never sat comfortably upon me. Many a man of my mind and in my position would have called himself a patriot, but I will not quarrel with the more opprobrious term.”
“Once a spy, always a spy,” she said resentfully.
Plainly her words cut him and he winced.
“I deserve that,” he returned, “and yet in my case it is far from true. I was forced to do a thing I loathed to save my neck, and I swear to you, Countess, by the honour of a soldier, by the Judge, before Whom, if I am caught here, I shall very soon stand, that, had I known the identity of the man I was employed against, had I known the false tongue, the treacherous heart of my employer, I would have gone whistling to my death before I would have sullied my poor hacked shield with the stain of that business.”
There was nothing of the spy about him now. His words rang true as her instinct told her. Still she would give in her belief grudgingly.
“I will entrust you with the letter if you are likely to have an opportunity of delivering it,” she said, a little more dubiously than was needful. She was not going to forgive too easily. “I presume it will go into your hands, whether I give it to you here or leave it under the sun-dial.”
“Assuredly,” he agreed cheerfully, ignoring the ungraciousness of her speech. “Since my friend, the Lieutenant, has commissioned me to seek for a letter which might lie there.”
“And which he would not trouble to seek himself,” she said with a little pout.