d his shoulders. "I speak English as well as you or any one
else. I think in English. But it pays me to look foreign, to fight
outwardly the 'civilising' influences of the country of my adoption."
A slight sneer twisted his lips. "I must look like a cut-throat,
because in that way I've reached the height I've attained in my
organisation. It shocks you, because you don't understand, because
you've never had to plough the row I've toiled along. . . . I'm not as
bad as I seem."

She picked up her work to cover the beating of her heart.

"If you're out of sympathy--"

"But I'm not out of sympathy," he interrupted earnestly. "I'm a Worker
of the World, and always will be. I would prefer not to have to dress
like this, but not because I deplore our aims. It is the misfortune of
the class of men for whom I fight. Miss Torrance"--he slid abruptly
down the trunk and leaned forward to look in her eyes--"I'm talking to
you as I never talked before, as I scarcely dared to think. Any one
else would hand me over to the Police. You won't. And to talk like
this to a fellow-worker would mean a knife slid in here. No, you won't
tell. I've known a lot of women, most of them bad ones because that's
the only kind I have a chance to meet, but I never knew one to sell a
man she did not hate . . . and a woman never hates till she first
loves. You've never loved more than one."

"And not likely to," she put in quietly, even as she thrilled to the
completeness of his trust.

He laughed harshly. "They all say that--that is, all but the kind any
man can buy. But you know nothing of them--forgive me for mentioning
them. . . . There aren't many women stick to their first love."

"Oh?" she said indifferently. "I haven't thought it worth discussing."

"No? Perhaps you're right. Many a time I've thought the same of
woman, all women--until I learned that every woman, good or bad, is
worth it."

His eyes had gone to the tree tops; they returned now so suddenly that
she started. A curious smile moved his lips.

"Do you know, you've disturbed all my convictions of women? I really
know so little of you that it may be foolish, but you've made me feel
that woman in the singular may be so much more to a man than the whole
mass of the sex. For you, or one of the very few like you, a man might
give up every other ambition without regret . . . and I've had
many--women and ambitions--in my day."

She was flushing, though she k