“If you are driven to such despicable work by poverty,” she said, unconsciously seeking excuse for him, “if it is the only trade you know—­then I suppose you can’t help—­”

“No,” he said, unwilling to let her gain even this false impression.  “My grandfather, who brought me up—­who owned the place I spoke of, near Coconut Grove—­left me enough to live on in pretty fair comfort.  I could have been an idler if I chose.  I didn’t choose.  I wanted work.  And I wanted adventure.  That was why I went into the Secret Service.  I stayed in it till I went overseas, and I came back to it after the war.  I wasn’t driven into it by poverty.  It’s an honorable profession.  There are hundreds of honorable men in it.  You probably know some of them.  They are in all walks of life, from Fifth Avenue to the slums.  They are working patriotically for the welfare of the land they love, and they are working for pitifully small reward.  It is not like the Secret Service of Germany or of oldtime Russia.  It upholds Democracy, not Tyranny.  And I’m proud to be a member of it.  At least, I was.  Now, there is nothing left to me but to resign.  It—­”

“You haven’t even the excuse of poverty!” she exclaimed, confusedly.  “And you have not even the grace to feel ashamed for—­for your black ingratitude in tricking us into giving you shelter and—­”

“I think I paid my bill for that, to some slight extent,” was his dry rejoinder.  “But for my ‘trickery,’ your half-brother would be dead, by now.  As for ‘ingratitude,’ how about the trick he served me, today?  Even if he didn’t know Hade had smuggled across a bagful of his pet moccasins to Roke, yet he let me be trapped into that—­”

“It’s only in the Devil’s Ledger, that two wrongs make a right!” she flamed.  “I grant my brother treated you abominably.  But his excuse was that your presence might ruin his great ambition in life.  Your only excuse for doing what you have done is the—­the foul instinct of the man-hunt.  The—­”

“The criminal-hunt,” he corrected her, trying not to writhe under her hot contempt.  “The enemy-to-man hunt, if you like.  Your half-brother—­”

“My brother is not a criminal!” she cried, furiously.  “You have no right to say so.  He has committed no crime.  He has broken no law.”

Again he looked down, searchingly, into her angry little face, as it confronted him so fiercely in the starlight.  And he knew she was sincere.

“Miss Standish,” he said, slowly.  “You believe you are telling the truth.  Your half-brother understood you too well to let you know what he was really up to.  He and Hade concocted some story—­I don’t know what—­to explain to you the odd things going on in and around your home.  You are innocent.  And you are ignorant.  It cuts me like a knife to have to open your eyes to all this.  But, in a very few days, at most, you are bound to know.”

“If you think I’ll believe a word against my brother—­especially from a self-confessed spy—­”