"If you'll let me--"
After a silence she turned and looked at him. He .stammered, very red: "I don't quite know why you speak to me so."
She herself was not entirely clear on that point, either. After all, her business with this man was to use him in the service of her Government."
"What is THE GREAT SECRET?" she asked calmly.
After a long while he said, lying there very still: "So you have even heard about that."
"I have heard about it; that is all."
"Do you know what it is?"
"All I know about it is that there is such a thing--something known to certain Germans, and by them spoken of as THE GREAT SECRET. I imagine, of course, that it is some vital military secret which they desire to guard."
"Is that all you know about it?"
"No, not all." She looked at him gravely out of very clear, honest eyes: "I know, also, that the Berlin Government has ordered its agents to discover your whereabouts, and to'silence' you."
He gazed at her quite blandly for a moment, then, to her amazement, he laughed--such a clear, untroubled, boyish laugh that her constrained expression softened in sympathy.
"Do you think that Berlin doesn't mean it?" she asked, brightening a little.
"Mean it? Oh, I'm jolly sure Berlin means it!"
"Then why--"
"Why do I laugh?"
"Well--yes. Why do you? It does not strike me as very humorous."
At that he laughed again--laughed so whole-heartedly, so delightfully, that the winning smile curved her own lips once more.
"Would you tell me why you laugh?" she inquired.
"I don't know. It seems so funny--those Huns, those Boches, already smeared from hair to feet with blood--pausing in their wholesale butchery to devise a plan to murder ME!"
His face altered; he raised himself on one elbow: "The swine have turned all Europe into a bloody wallow. They're belly-deep in it--Kaiser and knecht! But that's only part of it. They're destroying souls by millions!... Mine is already damned."
Miss Erith sprang to her feet: "I tell you not to say such a thing!" she cried, exasperated. "You're as young as I am! Besides, souls are not slain by murder. If they perish it's suicide, ALWAYS!"
She began to pace the white room nervously, flinging open her fur coat as she turned and came straight back to his bed again. Standing there and looking down at him she said: "We've got to fight it out. The country needs you. It's your bit and you've got to do it. There's a cure for alcoholism--Dr. Langford's cure. Are you afraid because you think it may hurt?"