"We'll say this evidence had piled up against Captain Kilmeny instead of against me. Would you have believed him guilty?"
"No. He couldn't have done it."
"On the same evidence you would acquit him and condemn me. Is that fair?"
"I have known him for years—his standards, his ways of thinking. All his life he has schooled himself to run a straight course."
"Whereas I——" He waited, the sardonic frosty smile on his lean strong face.
Moya knew that the flutter of her pulses was telling tales in the pink of her cheeks. "I don't know you."
"I'm only a workingman, and an American at that—so it follows that I must be a criminal," he answered with a touch of bitterness.
"No—no! But you're—different. There's something untamed about you. I don't quite know how to put it—as if you had been brought up without restraints, as if you didn't care much for law."
"Why should I? Law is a weapon to bolster up the rich and keep down the poor," he flung back with an acid smile. "But there's law and law. Even in our class we have our standards, such as they are."
"Now it's you that isn't fair," she told him quietly. "You know I meant nothing like that. The point is that I don't know what your standards are. Law doesn't mean so much to people here. Your blood runs freer, less evenly than ours. You don't let the conventions hamper you."