"I know what you mean," he told her easily, a smile in his shrewd eyes. "You're a young woman—and I'm an ineligible man. So Lady Farquhar thinks we oughtn't to meet. That's all bosh. I'm not intending to make love to you, even though I think you're a mighty nice girl. But say I was. What then? Your friends can't shut you up in a glass cage if you're going to keep on growing. Life was made to be lived."
"Yes.... Yes.... That's what I think," she cried eagerly. "But it isn't arranged for girls that way—not if they belong to the class I do. We're shut in—chaperoned from everything that's natural. You don't know how I hate it."
"Of course you do. You're a live wire. That's why you're going to sit down and listen to me."
She looked him straight between the eyes. "But I don't think morality is only a convention, Mr. Kilmeny. 'Thou shalt not steal,' for instance."
"Depends what you steal. If you take from a man what doesn't belong to him you're doing the community a service. But we won't go into that now, though I'll just say this. What is right for me wouldn't be for Captain Kilmeny. As I told you before, our standards are different."
"Yes, you explained that to me just after you—while you were hiding from the officers after the first robbery," she assented dryly.
He looked at her and laughed. "You're prosecuting attorney and judge and jury all in one, aren't you?"
She held her little head uncompromisingly erect. Not again was she going to let her sympathy for him warp her judgment.
"I'm ready to hear what you have to say, Mr. Kilmeny."
"Not guilty, ma'am."