The color was leaving the girl’s cheeks, but she sat even straighter, prouder.  As for me, for one instant I experienced a blessed relief.  I had been right; it was all impossible.  One didn’t talk seriously of red-hot irons.

“You must think you are King John,” I laughed.  “But you’re overplaying.  Don’t worry, Miss Falconer; he won’t touch you.  There are things that men don’t do.”

He looked at me, not angrily, not in resentment, but in pure contempt; and I remembered.  There were people, hundreds of them, in the burning villages of Belgium, in the ravaged lands of northern France, who had once felt the same assurance that certain things couldn’t be done and had learned that they could.  I glanced at the men who were piling wood on the hearth, at their sullen blue eyes, their air of rather stupid arrogance.  I had walked, it seemed, into a nightmare; but then, so had the world.

“This isn’t a tea party, Mr. Bayne,” said Franz von Blenheim.  “It is war.  Those papers belong to my government and they are going back.  I shall stop at nothing, nothing on earth, to get them; so if you have any influence with this young lady, you had better use it now.”

“I am not afraid.”  The girl’s voice was unshaken, bless her.  “I said you could kill me—­and I meant it.  But I will not tell.”

“And I will not kill you, Miss Falconer.”  The German’s tones were level, and his eyes, as they dwelt steadily on her, were as hard and cold as steel.  “I don’t want you dead; I want you living, with a tongue and using it; and you will use it.  You talk bravely, but you have no conception—­how should you have?—­of physical pain.  When that iron is red-hot, if you have not spoken, I shall hold it to your arm and press it—­”

“Damn you!” The cry was wrenched out of me.  “Not while I am here!”

“You will be here, Mr. Bayne, just so long as it suits me.”  A sort of cold ferocity was growing in Blenheim’s tones.  “And you have yourself to thank for your position, let me remind you; you would thrust yourself in.  I don’t know what you are doing in the business—­a ridiculous mountebank in a leather cap and coat!  It’s a way you Yankees have, meddling in things that don’t concern you.  You seem to think that you have special rights under Providence, that you own everything in the universe, even to the high seas.  Well, we’ll settle with your country for its munitions and its notes and its driveling talk about atrocities a little later, when we have finished up the Allies.  And I’ll deal with you to-night if you dare to lift a hand.”

There seemed only one answer possible, and my muscles were stiffening for it when suddenly Miss Falconer’s handkerchief, a mere wisp of linen which she had been clenching between her fingers, dropped to the floor.  With a purely automatic movement, I bent to recover it for her; she leaned down to receive it.  Her pale face and lovely dilated eyes were close to me for a fleeting second, and though her lips did not move, I seemed to catch the merest breath, the faintest gossamer whisper that said: