“So like you, dear Herr Selingman!” Anna murmured.

Selingman beamed.

“Ever gracious, dear lady.  Well, to continue, then.  Here I find a young Englishman of exactly the order and position likely to be useful to us.  I approach him frankly.  He has been humiliated by the country he was willing to serve.  I talk to him of that country.  ’You are English, of course,’ I remind him, ’but what manner of an England is it to-day which claims you?’ It is a very telling argument, this.  Upon the classes of this country, democracy has laid a throttling hand.  There is a spirit of discontent, they say, among the working-classes, the discontent which breeds socialism.  There is a worse spirit of discontent among the upper classes here, and it is the discontent which breeds so-called traitors.”

“I can imagine all the rest,” Anna interposed coolly.  “How far have you succeeded?”

“The young man,” Selingman told her, “has accepted my proposals.  He has drawn three months’ salary in advance.  He furnished me yesterday with details of a private conversation with a well-known Cabinet Minister.”

Anna turned her head.  “So soon!” she murmured.

“So soon,” Selingman repeated.  “And now, gracious lady, here comes my visit to you.  We have a recruit, invaluable if he is indeed a recruit at heart, dangerous if he has the brains and wit to choose to make himself so.  I, on my way through life, judge men and women, and I judge them—­well, with few exceptions, unerringly, but at the back of my brain there lingers something of mistrust of this young man.  I have seen others in his position accept similar proposals.  I have seen the struggles of shame, the doubts, the assertion of some part of a man’s lower nature reconciling him in the end to accepting the pay of a foreign country.  I have seen none of these things in this young man—­simply a cold and deliberate acceptance of my proposals.  He conforms to no type.  He sets up before me a problem which I myself have failed wholly to solve.  I come to you, dear lady, for your aid.”

“I am to spy upon the spy,” she remarked.

“It is an easy task,” Selingman declared.  “This young man is your slave.  Whatever your daily business may be here, some part of your time, I imagine, will be spent in his company.  Let me know what manner of man he is.  Is this innate corruptness which brings him so easily to the bait, or is it the stinging smart of injustice from which he may well be suffering?  Or, failing these, has he dared to set his wits against mine, to play the double traitor?  If even a suspicion of this should come to you, there must be an end of Mr. Francis Norgate.”

Anna toyed for a moment with the rose at her bosom.  Her eyes were looking out of the room.  Once again she was conscious of a curious slackening of purpose, a confusion of issues which had once seemed to her so clear.

“Very well,” she promised.  “I will send you a report in the course of a few days.”