“You think it is love for him that prompts me now?” Her eyes blazed, but there was a contemptuous laugh at her lips, and she nervously pulled at the tails of her sable muff.  “You are wrong—­absolutely.  I would rather bury myself in the mud of the Thames than let him touch me.  Oh, I know what his life must have been—­the life of him that you know!  With him it would either be the sewer or the sycamore-tree of Zaccheus; either the little upper chamber among the saints or eating husks with the swine.  I realize him now.  He was easily susceptible to good and evil, to the clean and the unclean; and he might have been kept in order by some one who would give a life to building up his character; but his nature was rickety, and he has gone down and not up.”

“Then why try to save him?  Let Oom Paul have him.  He’ll do no more harm, if—­”

“Wait a minute,” she urged.  “You are a great man”—­she came close to him—­“and you ought to understand what I mean, without my saying it.  I want to save him for his own sake, not for mine—­to give him a chance.  While there’s life there’s hope.  To go as he is, with the mud up to his lips—­ah, can’t you see!  He is the father of my dead child.  I like to feel that he may make some thing of his life and of himself yet.  That’s why I haven’t tried to divorce him, and—­”

“If you ever want to do so—­” he interrupted, meaningly.

“Yes, I know.  I have always been sure that nothing could be quite so easy; but I waited, on the chance of something getting hold of him which would lift him out of himself, give him something to think of so much greater than himself, some cause, perhaps—­”

“He had you and your unborn child,” he intervened.

“Me—!” She laughed bitterly.  “I don’t think men would ever be better because of me.  I’ve never seen that.  I’ve seen them show the worst of human nature because of me—­and it wasn’t inspiring.  I’ve not met many men who weren’t on the low levels.”

“He hasn’t stood his trial for the Johannesburg conspiracy yet.  How do you propose to help him?  He is in real danger of his life.”

She laughed coldly, and looked at him with keen, searching eyes.  “You ask that, you who know that in the armory of life there’s one all-powerful weapon?”

He nodded his head whimsically.  “Money?  Well, whatever other weapons you have, you must have that, I admit.  And in the Transvaal—­”

“Then here,” she said, handing him an envelope—­“here is what may help.”

He took it hesitatingly.  “I warn you,” he remarked, “that if money is to be used at all, it must be a great deal.  Kruger will put up the price to the full capacity of the victim.”

“I suppose this victim has nothing,” she ventured, quietly.

“Nothing but what the others give him, I should think.  It may be a very costly business, even if it is possible, and you—­”

“I have twenty thousand pounds,” she said.