He smiled sadly. "The _Clara_ was a little slow tub compared to the _Lusitania_, but she meant a lot to me."

"And to me. So did the _Lusitania_. She nearly cost me my life."

He was startled. "You didn't plan to sail on her?"

"No, but--" She paused. She had not meant to open this subject.

But he was aching to hear her version of what Larrey had told.

"How do you mean--she nearly cost you your life?"

"Oh, that's one of the dark chapters of my past."

"You never told me about it."

"I'd rather not."

"Please!" He said it with a surprising earnestness. He had a sudden hope that her confession might be an absolving explanation.

She could not fathom this eagerness, but she felt a desire to release that old secret. She began, recklessly:

"Well, I told you how I ran away from home and went on the stage, and Sir Joseph Webling--"

"You told me that much, but not what happened before you met him."

"No, I didn't tell you that, and I'm not going to now, but--well, Sir Joseph was like a father to me; I never had one of my own--to know and remember. Sir Joseph was German born, and perhaps the ruthlessness was contagious, for he--well, I can't tell you."

"Please!"

"I swore not to."

"You gave your oath to a German?"

"No, to an English officer in the Secret Service. I'm always forgetting and starting to tell."

"Why did you take your oath?"

"I traded secrecy for freedom."

"You mean you turned state's evidence?"

"Oh no, I didn't tell on them. I didn't know what they were up to when they used me for-- But I'm skidding now. I want to tell you--terribly.

But I simply must not. I made an awful mistake that night at Mrs.

Prothero's in pretending to be ill."

"You only pretended?"

"Yes, to get you away. You see, Lady Clifton-Wyatt got after me, accused me of being a spy, of carrying messages that resulted in the sinking of ships and the killing of men. She said that the police came to our house, and Sir Joseph tried to kill one of them and killed his own wife and then was shot by an officer and that they gave out the story that Sir Joseph and Lady Webling died of ptomaine poisoning. She said Nicky Easton was shot in the Tower. Oh, an awful story she told, and I was afraid she'd tell you, so I spirited you away on the pretext of illness."

Davidge was astounded at this confirmation of Larrey's story. He said:

"But it wasn't true what Lady C.-W. told?"

"Most of it was false, but it was fiction founded on fact, and I couldn't explain it without breaking my oath. And now I've pretty nearly broken it, after all. I've sprained it badly."

"Don't you want to go on and--finish it off?"

"I want to--oh, how I want to! but I've got to save a few shreds of respectability. I kidnapped you the day you were going to tea with Lady C.-W. to keep you from her. I wish now I'd let you go. Then you'd have known the worst of me--or worse than the worst."

She turned a harrowed glance his way, and saw, to her bewilderment, that he was smiling broadly. Then he seized her hands and felt a need to gather her home to his arms.

She was so amazed that she fell back to stare at him. Studying his radiant face, she somehow guessed that he had known part of her story before and was glad to hear her confess it, but her intuition missed fire when she guessed at the source of his information.

"You have been talking to Lady Clifton-Wyatt, after all!"

"Not since I saw her with you."

"Then who told you?"

He laughed now, for it pleased him mightily to have her read his heart so true.

"The main thing is that you told me. And now once more I ask you: will you marry me?"

This startled her indeed. She startled him no less by her brusquerie:

"Certainly not."

"And why not?"

"I'll marry no man who is so careless whom he marries as you are."

CHAPTER IX

The whimsical solemnity of this made him roar. But a man does not love a woman the less for being feminine, and when she thwarts him by a womanliness she delights him excruciatingly.

But Mamise was in earnest. She believed in one emotion at a time. It offended her to have Davidge suggest that the funeral baked meats of her tragedy should coldly furnish forth a wedding breakfast. She wanted to revel awhile in her elegiac humor and pay full honor to her sorrow, full penalty for her guilt. She put aside his amorous impatience and returned to her theme.

"Well, after all the evil I have done, I wanted to make some atonement. I was involved in the sinking of I don't know how many ships, and I wanted to take some part in building others. So when I met you and you told me that women could build ships, too, you wakened a great hope in me, and an ambition. I wanted to get out in the yards and swing a sledge or drive a riveting-gun."

"With those hands?" He laughed and reached for them.

She put them out of sight back of her as one removes dangerous toys from the clutch of a child, and went on:

"But you wouldn't let me. So I took up the next best thing, office work. I studied that hateful stenography and learned to play a typewriter."