e not tame. Same here! You have been chucked out into this
rotten world of 'yporcrits. Same here!"

Her stillness, her appalled stillness, wore to him an air of fascinated
attention. He asked abruptly:

"Where is it?"

She made an effort to breathe out:

"Where's what?"

His tone expressed excited secrecy.

"The swag--plunder--pieces. It's a game of grab. We must have it; but it
isn't easy, and so you will have to lend a hand. Come! is it kept in the
house?"

As often with women, her wits were sharpened by the very terror of the
glimpsed menace. She shook her head negatively.

"No."

"Sure?"

"Sure," she said.

"Ay! Thought so. Does your gentleman trust you?"

Again she shook her head.

"Blamed 'yporcrit," he said feelingly, and then reflected: "He's one of
the tame ones, ain't he?"

"You had better find out for yourself," she said.

"You trust me. I don't want to die before you and I have made friends."
This was said with a strange air of feline gallantry. Then, tentatively:
"But he could be brought to trust you, couldn't he?"

"Trust me?" she said, in a tone which bordered on despair, but which he
mistook for derision.

"Stand in with us," he urged. "Give the chuck to all this blamed
'yporcrisy. Perhaps, without being trusted, you have managed to find out
something already, eh?"

"Perhaps I have," she uttered with lips that seemed to her to be
freezing fast.

Ricardo now looked at her calm face with something like respect. He was
even a little awed by her stillness, by her economy of words. Womanlike,
she felt the effect she had produced, the effect of knowing much and of
keeping all her knowledge in reserve. So far, somehow, this had come,
about of itself. Thus encouraged, directed in the way of duplicity, the
refuge of the weak, she made a heroically conscious effort and forced
her stiff, cold lips into a smile.

Duplicity--the refuge of the weak and the cowardly, but of the disarmed,
too! Nothing stood between the enchanted dream of her existence and
a cruel catastrophe but her duplicity. It seemed to her that the man
sitting there before her was an unavoidable presence, which had attended
all her life. He was the embodied evil of the world. She was not ashamed
of her duplicity. With a woman's frank courage, as soon as she saw
that opening she threw herself into it without reserve, with only one
doubt--that of her own strength. She was appalled by the situation; but
already all her arou