“Elizabeth, you are talking nonsense,” I said, with an affectation of brusqueness. “Let us sit down in the next room, and I propose a compact. You shall take the dagger, provided you do not attempt to harm yourself with it till you have heard me. Is that agreed?”
She scrutinized me for half a minute. Then she nodded. I preceded her into the library with an affectation of indifference which I was far from feeling, for I heard her stoop to pick the dagger up, and wondered each instant whether I was about to feel the point between my shoulders. However, my faith appeared to inspire her with a measure of confidence, for she followed me into the middle room and consented to sit down.
But when I faced her, toying with the blade and all aquiver with the reaction from the terrific nerve-tension, I could hardly find words to utter. Whatever purpose Lembken might have in using me, I had the full measure of his mind. He had thought that my three weeks spent in David’s house had inspired me with a passion for the girl; and he had brought her here, to leave her helpless in my power, a lure to bind me to his interests beyond the possibility of double-dealing.
Before I could begin, Elizabeth collapsed. She began to weep without restraint. I could only wait till she grew more composed. I stared out through the window, looking down toward the Airscouts’ Fortress, whose roof rose perhaps twenty feet beneath me.
I saw the sentry with the swan badge, pacing below. Above him was the luminous wall of the fortress, and over it, floating in the air, was a host of ghostly shapes, airplanes encased in their phosphorescent glow armor, which, as I watched them, rose one by one into the air, circled, and flitted noiselessly away toward the south, like bubbles blown by children.
It could not have been late, for curfew had not come into operation, and London was ablaze with the solar light; but the crowds had gone home and everything was quite still. As I withdrew from the window Elizabeth rose and came timidly toward me.
“Arnold, have I done you a wrong?” she whispered.
“You misunderstood me,” I answered. “But you could not have thought otherwise. If we understand each other now we can help each other—isn’t that so?”
She seized me by both arms and gazed into my face with an imploring, pitiful appeal that wrung my heart.
“Then I thank God,” she said, “for that impulse which held me from self-destruction. Arnold, do you remember that promise I made to you one day? I remembered it; I remembered it, and it was that alone which stayed my hand this afternoon, when the emissary from Lembken came, and there was only the one barred door between us, and I stood behind it, with the knife at my breast. Then I resolved to keep my promise to you, and to let them bring me here, and—to kill Lembken—but it was you! When you disappeared from the Strangers’ House this morning we feared for your safety. We thought you had been seized or lured away. Then my father was summoned on some pretext back to the Strangers’ Bureau, and the airscout came—Lembken’s man. I thought I was for Lembken—”