d light it. There are some
sticks over yonder,--but if you don't find enough, break up a chair.
Then when you get a good blaze, heat me one of the fire-irons. Heat it
red-hot. And be quick! We are wasting time!"

The color was leaving the girl's cheeks, but she sat even straighter,
prouder. As for me, for one instant I experienced a blessed relief.
I had been right; it was all impossible. One didn't talk seriously of
red-hot irons.

"You must think you are King John," I laughed. "But you're overplaying.
Don't worry, Miss Falconer; he won't touch you. There are things that
men don't do."

He looked at me, not angrily, not in resentment, but in pure contempt;
and I remembered. There were people, hundreds of them, in the burning
villages of Belgium, in the ravaged lands of northern France, who had
once felt the same assurance that certain things couldn't be done and
had learned that they could. I glanced at the men who were piling wood
on the hearth, at their sullen blue eyes, their air of rather stupid
arrogance. I had walked, it seemed, into a nightmare; but then, so had
the world.

"This isn't a tea party, Mr. Bayne," said Franz von Blenheim. "It is
war. Those papers belong to my government and they are going back. I
shall stop at nothing, nothing on earth, to get them; so if you have any
influence with this young lady, you had better use it now."

"I am not afraid." The girl's voice was unshaken, bless her. "I said you
could kill me--and I meant it. But I will not tell."

"And I will not kill you, Miss Falconer." The German's tones were level,
and his eyes, as they dwelt steadily on her, were as hard and cold as
steel. "I don't want you dead; I want you living, with a tongue and
using it; and you will use it. You talk bravely, but you have no
conception--how should you have?--of physical pain. When that iron is
red-hot, if you have not spoken, I shall hold it to your arm and press
it--"

"Damn you!" The cry was wrenched out of me. "Not while I am here!"

"You will be here, Mr. Bayne, just so long as it suits me." A sort of
cold ferocity was growing in Blenheim's tones. "And you have yourself
to thank for your position, let me remind you; you would thrust yourself
in. I don't know what you are doing in the business--a ridiculous
mountebank in a leather cap and coat! It's a way you Yankees have,
meddling in things that don't concern you. You seem to think that you
have special rights under Providence, that you