“Who are you?” she asked, dully bewildered under his fierce tirade of self-contempt.  “Who are you?  What are you?”

“I’m Gavin Brice,” he said.  “As I told you.  But I’m also a United States Secret Service official—­which I didn’t tell you.”

“No!” she stammered, shrinking back.  “Oh, no!”

He continued, briskly: 

“Your brother, and your snake-loving friend Rodney Hade, are working a pretty trick on Uncle Sam.  And the Federal Government has been trying to block it for the past few months.  There are plenty of us down here, just now.  But, up to lately, nothing’s been accomplished.  That’s why they sent me.  They knew I’d had plenty of experience in this region.”

“Here?  In Florida?  But—­”

“I spent all my vacations at my grandfather’s place, below Coconut Grove, when I was in school and in college and for a while afterward, and I know this coast and the keys as well as any outsider can,—­even if I was silly enough to let my scow run into a reef to-night, that wasn’t here in my day.  They sent me to take charge of the job and to straighten out its mixups and to try to win where the others had bungled.  I was doing it, too,—­and it would have been a big feather in my cap, at Washington, when my good sense went to pieces on a reef named Claire Standish,—­a reef I hadn’t counted on, any more than I counted on the reef that stove in my scow, an hour ago.”

She strove to speak.  The words died in her parched throat.  Brice went on: 

“I’ve always bragged that I’m woman-proof.  I’m not.  No man is.  I hadn’t met the right woman.  That was all.  If you’d been of the vampire type or the ordinary kind, I could have gone on with it, without turning a hair.  If you’d been mixed up in any of the criminal part of it at all—­as I and all of us supposed you must be—­I’d have had no scruples about using any information I could get from you.  But—­well, tonight, out here, all at once I understood what I’d been denying to myself ever since I met you.  And I couldn’t go on with it.  You’ll be certain to suffer from it, in any case.  But I’m strong enough at the Department to persuade them you’re innocent.  I—­”

“Do you mean,” she stammered, incredulously, finding hesitant words at last, “Do you mean you’re a—­a spy?  That you came to our house—­that you ate our bread—­with the idea of learning secrets that might injure us?  That you—?  Oh!” she burst forth in swift revulsion, “I didn’t know any one could be so —­so vile!  I—­”

“Wait!” he commanded, sharply, wincing nevertheless under the sick scorn in her voice and words.  “You have no right to say that.  I am not a spy.  Or if I am, then every police officer and every detective and every cross-examining lawyer is a spy!  I am an official in the United States Secret Service.  I, and others like me, try to guard the welfare of our country and to expose or thwart persons who are that country’s enemies or who are working to injure its interests.  If that is being a spy, then I’m content to be one.  I—­”