elp
you?"

"You can't," she answered, shaking her head. "No one could."

"How can you tell that?" he asked eagerly. "Perhaps I know more already
than you think."

"I daresay you do," she said slowly. "I have thought that a long time.
Will you tell me one thing?--Are you his friend or not?"

There was no need for Dunn to ask to whom the pronoun she used referred.

"I am so much not his friend," he answered as quietly and deliberately
as she had spoken. "That it's either his life or mine."

At that she drew back in a startled way as though his words had gone
beyond her expectations.

"How do I know I can trust you?" she said presently, half to herself,
half to him.

"You can," he said, and it was as though he flung the whole of his
enigmatic and vivid personality into those two words.

"You can," he said again. "Absolutely."

"I must think," she muttered, pressing her hands to her head. "So much
depends--how can I trust you? Why should I--why?"

"Because I'll trust you first," he answered with a touch of exultation
in his manner. "Listen to me and I'll tell you everything. And that
means I put my life in your hands. Well, that's nothing; I would do that
any time; but other people's lives will be in your power, too--yes, and
everything I'm here for, everything. Now listen."

"Not now," she interrupted sharply. "He may be watching, listening--he
generally is." Again there was no need between them to specify to whom
the pronoun referred. "Will you meet me tonight near the sweet-pea
border--about nine?"

She glided away as she spoke without waiting for him to answer, and as
soon as he was free from the magic of her presence, reaction came and he
was torn by a thousand doubts and fears and worse.

"Why, I'm mad, mad," he groaned. "I've no right to tell what I said I
would, no right at all."

And again there returned to him his vivid, dreadful memory of how she
had started on that midnight drive with her car so awfully laden.

And again there returned to him his old appalling doubt:

"Did she not know?"

And though he would willingly have left his life in her hands, he knew
he had no right to put that of others there, and yet it seemed to him he
must keep the appointment and the promise he had made.

About nine that evening, then, he made his way to the sweet-pea border,
though, as he went, he resolved that he would not tell her what he had
said he would.

Because he trusted his own strength so little