“I paid a debt,” he reminded her.

“I suppose there is something in that,” she admitted.  “I really believe that that exceedingly unpleasant person with whom I was brought into temporary association would have killed you if I had allowed it.”

“I am inclined to agree with you,” he assented.  “I saw him very hazily, but a more criminal type of countenance I never beheld.”

“So that we are quits,” she ventured.

“With a little debt on my side still to be paid.”

“Well, there is no telling what demands I may make upon our acquaintance.”

“Acquaintance?” he protested.

“Would you like to call it friendship?”

“A very short time ago;” he said deliberately, “even friendship would not have satisfied me.”

“And now?”

“I dislike mysteries.”

“Poor me!” she sighed.  “However, you can rid yourself of the shadow of one as soon as you like after luncheon.  It would be quite safe now, I think, for me to take back that packet.”

“Yes,” he assented slowly, “I suppose that it would.”

She looked up into his face.  Something that she saw there brought her own delicate eyebrows together in a slight frown.

“You will give it me after lunch?” she proposed.

“I think not,” was the quiet reply.

“You were only entrusted with it for a time,” she reminded him, with ominous calm.  “It belongs to me.”

“A document received in this surreptitious fashion,” he pronounced, “is presumably a treasonable document.  I have no intention of returning it to you.”

She walked by his side for a few moments in silence.  Glancing down into her face, Julian was almost startled.  There were none of the ordinary signs of anger there, but an intense white passion, the control of which was obviously costing her a prodigious effort.  She touched his fingers with her ungloved hand as she stepped over a stile, and he found them icy cold.  All the joy of that unexpectedly sunny morning seemed to have passed.

“I am sorry, Miss Abbeway,” he said almost humbly, “that you take my decision so hardly.  I ask you to remember that I am just an ordinary, typical Englishman, and that I have already lied for your sake.  Will you put yourself in my place?”

They had climbed the little ridge of grass-grown sand and stood looking out seaward.  Suddenly all the anger seemed to pass from her face.  She lifted her head, her soft brown eyes flashed into his, the little curl of her lips seemed to transform her whole expression.  She was no longer the gravely minded prophetess of a great cause, the scheming woman, furious at the prospect of failure.  She was suddenly wholly feminine, seductive, a coquette.

“If you were just an ordinary, stupid, stolid Englishman,” she whispered, “why did you risk your honour and your safety for my sake?  Will you tell me that, dear man of steel?”