red, "and I detest them. Now, Francis, please tell me
the truth. Is your name, too, upon that long roll of those who are
pledged to assist his country?"

"It is," he admitted.

She drew a little away.

"You admit it? You have already consented?"

"I have drawn a quarter's salary," Norgate confessed. "I have entered
Selingman's corps of the German Secret Service."

"You mean that you are a traitor!" she exclaimed.

"A traitor to the false England of to-day," Norgate replied, "a friend,
I hope, of the real England."

She sat quite still for some moments.

"Somehow or other," she said, "I scarcely fancied that you would give in
so easily."

"You seem disappointed," he remarked, "yet, after all, am I not on
your side?"

"I suppose so," she answered, without enthusiasm.

There was another and a more prolonged silence. Norgate rose at last
to his feet. He walked restlessly to the end of the room and back
again. A dark mass of clouds had rolled up; the air seemed almost
sulphurous with the presage of a coming storm. They looked out into
the gathering darkness.

"I don't understand," he said. "You are Austrian; that is the same as
German. I tell you that I have come over on your side. You seem
disappointed."

"Perhaps I am," she admitted, standing up, too, and linking her arm
through his. "You see, my mother was English, and they say that I am
entirely like her. I was brought up here in the English country.
Sometimes my life at Vienna and Berlin seems almost like a dream to me,
something unreal, as though I were playing at being some other woman.
When I am back here, I feel as though I had come home. Do you know really
that nothing would make me happier than to hear or think nothing about
duty, to just know that I had come back to England to stay, and that you
were English, and that we were going to live just the sort of life I
pictured to myself that two people could live so happily over here,
without too much ambition, without intrigue, simply and honestly. I am a
little weary of cities and courts, Francis. To-night more than ever
England seems to appeal to me, to remind me that I am one of her
daughters."

"Are you trying me, Anna?" he asked hoarsely.

"Trying you? Of course not!" she answered. "I am speaking to you just
simply and naturally, because you are the one person in the world to whom
I may speak like that."

"Then let's drop it, both of us!" he exclaimed, holding her arm
tightly to his. "Cour