by "dirty work"? To be sure,
spying, in its usual sense, is not held to be one of the noblest of
occupations, but--in such a cause as this! It was absurd, ridiculous, to
call it "dirty work." And what did he mean by the words which he had
used afterward? Ste. Marie did not quite follow the idiom about the "big
enough pot," but he assumed that it referred to money. Did the young
fool think he was being paid for his efforts? That was ridiculous, too.

The boy's face came before him as it had looked with that sudden hard
and bitter expression. What did he mean by saying that no one knew the
crookedness of humanity under money temptation better than he knew it
after something that had happened to him? In a sense his words were
doubtless very true. Captain Stewart--and he must have been "old
Charlie"; Ste. Marie remembered that the name was Charles--O'Hara, and
O'Hara's daughter stood excellent examples of that bit of cynicism, but
obviously the boy had not spoken in that sense--certainly not before
Mlle. O'Hara! He meant something else, then. But what--what?

Ste. Marie rose with some difficulty to his feet and carried the pillows
back to the bed whence he had taken them. He sat down upon the edge of
the bed, staring in great perplexity across the room at the open window,
but all at once he uttered an exclamation and smote his hands together.

"That boy doesn't know!" he cried. "They're tricking him, these others!"

The lad's face came once more before him, and it was a foolish and
stubborn face, perhaps, but it was neither vicious nor mean. It was the
face of an honest, headstrong boy who would be incapable of the cold
cruelty to which all circumstances seemed to point.

"They're tricking him somehow!" cried Ste. Marie again. "They're lying
to him and making him think--"

What was it they were making him think, these three conspirators? What
possible thing could they make him think other than the plain truth?
Ste. Marie shook a weary head and lay down among his pillows. He wished
that he had "old Charlie" in a corner of that room with his fingers
round "old Charlie's" wicked throat. He would soon get at the truth
then; or O'Hara, either, that grim and saturnine chevalier d'industrie,
though O'Hara would be a bad handful to manage; or--Ste. Marie's head
dropped back with a little groan when the face of young Arthur's
enchantress came between him and the opposite wall of the room and her
great and tragic eyes looked in