“No?” said Gavin.  “And you’re just as sure of Rodney Hade’s noble uprightness as of your brother’s ?”

“I’m not defending Rodney Hade,” said Claire.  “He is nothing to me, one way or the other.  He—­”

“Pardon me,” interposed Brice.  “He is a great deal to you.  You hate him and you are in mortal fear of him.”

“If you spied that out, too—­”

“I did,” he admitted.  “I did it, in the half-minute I saw you and him together, last evening.  I saw a look in your eyes—­I heard a tone in your voice—­as you turned to introduce me to him—­that told me all I needed to know.  And, incidentally, it made me want to smash him.  Apart from that—­well, the Department knows a good deal about Rodney Hade.  And it suspects a great deal more.  It knows, among minor things, that he schemed to make Milo Standish plunge so heavily on certain worthless stocks that Standish went broke and in desperation raised a check of Hade’s (and did it rather badly, as Hade had foreseen he would, when he set the trap)—­in order to cover his margins.  It—­”

“No!” she cried, in wrathful refusal to believe.  “That is not true.  It can’t be true!  It is a—­”

“Hade holds a mortgage on everything Standish owns,” resumed Brice, “and he has held that raised check over him as a prison-menace.  He—­”

“Stop!” demanded Claire, ablaze with righteous indignation.  “If you have such charges to make against my brother, are you too much of a coward to come to his house with me, now, and make them to his face?  Are you?”

“No,” he said, without a trace of unwillingness or of bravado.  “I am not.  I’ll go there, with you, gladly.  In the meantime—­”

“In the meantime,” she caught him up, “please don’t speak to me.  And please sit in the other end of the boat, if you don’t mind.  The air will be easier to breathe if—­”

“Certainly,” he assented, making his way to the far end of the launch, while she seized the neglected steering wheel again.  “And I am sorrier than I can say, that I have had to tell you all this.  If it were not that you must know it, soon, anyway, I’d have bitten my tongue out, sooner than make you so unhappy.  Please believe that, won’t you?”

There was an earnest depth of contrition in his voice that checked the icy retort she had been about to make.  And, emboldened by her silence, he went on: 

“Hade needed your brother and the use of your brother’s house and land.  He needed them, imperatively, for the scheme he was trying to swing ....  That was why he got Standish into his power, in the first place.  That was why he forced or wheedled him into this partnership.  The Standish house was built, in its original form, more than a hundred years ago.  In the days when Dade County and all this end of Florida were in hourly dread of Seminole raids from the Everglade country, and where every settler’s house must be not only his castle, but—­”