And there, too, a martyr to the country’s cause, lay Thomas Dean.  A sob of pity rose in Jane’s throat as she thought of him, and the great tears rolled unchecked down her cheeks.  He was so young, so brave, so fine.  Why must Death have come to him when there was yet so much he might have done?  With his talent and education, with his wonderful spirit of self-sacrifice, he might have gone far and high.  Regretfully, she recalled that he had loved her, and with kind pity in her heart she reproached herself for not having been able to return to this fine, clean, American youth the affection she had inspired in him.

Thomas Dean, she told herself, was the type of man she should have loved, a man of her own people, with her own ideals, a man of her country, her flag, and yet—­

There on the floor, not a dozen feet away from her, shameful circlets of steel girdling both his wrists and his ankles, lay the one man for whom she knew now she cared the most in all the world, the man she had just betrayed into Chief Fleck’s hands.

Bitterly she reproached herself for not having tried to induce Frederic to escape.  In mental anguish she pictured him—­the man she loved—­standing in the prisoner’s dock in some courtroom, branded as a spy, as a leader of spies, charged with an attempt to slaughter the inhabitants—­the women and children—­of a sleeping, unprotected city.  With growing horror it came to her that in all probability she herself would be called on to testify against him.  It might even be her evidence that would result in his being led out before a firing squad and put to an ignominious death.

She dared not even look in his direction now.  What must he be thinking about her?  He had known that she loved him.  In despair and doubt she wondered whether he could understand that she, too, had been influenced to perform her soul-wracking task by a sense of honor, of duty to her country equally as potent as that which had impelled him to participate in this terrible plan to destroy New York.  Why had she not informed him that his plans were known to the United States Government’s agents?  Surely she could have convinced him that his was a hopeless mission.  The plot would have been successfully thwarted, and he would not be lying there in shackles, but, even though forced to flee, who knew, perhaps some day after peace had come, he might have been able to return for her.  A great sob rose from her heart, but she stifled it back.  She would be brave and true.  She must be glad for those of her people that had been saved.

But her parents!  What would they say?  Her father and mother soon now must learn that she had been deceiving them day after day.  How horrified and amazed they would be to learn that the chauffeur she had brought into the household was in reality a government detective, and that she, their daughter, had been a witness of his tragic death.  What would they think when they learned about her part in this gruesome drama that had just been enacted?  They, serene in their trust in her, supposing she was at the home of one of her girl friends, were peacefully asleep in their quiet apartment.  How horror-stricken her mother would be if she could have seen her daughter at this moment, alone at midnight in a mountain shack, one girl among a band of strange men—­and two men stretched dead on the floor.