in this country in order to commit sabotage
and slow up the production of the ammunition our troops are crying
for. He has plotted with others to send defective shells that will rip
up the guns they do not fit, and powders that will explode too soon or
not at all. God! to think that the lives of our brave men and the life
of our Empire should be threatened by such people as you!

"And in the American field Sir Joseph has connived with a syndicate to
purchase factories, to stop production at the source, since your
U-boats and your red-handed diplomatic spies cannot stop it otherwise.
Your agents have corrupted a few of the Yankees, and killed others,
and would have killed more if the name of your people had not become
such a horror even in that land where millions of Germans live that
every proffer is suspect.

"You see, we know you, Lady Webling and Sir Joseph. We have watched
you all the while from the very first, and we know that you are not
innocent even of complicity in the supreme infamy of luring the
_Lusitania_ to her death."

He was quivering with the rush of his emotions over the broken dam of
habitual reticence.

Lady Webling and Sir Joseph had quivered, too, less under the impact
of his denunciation than in the confusion of their own exposure to
themselves and to Marie Louise.

They had watched her eyes as she heard Mr. Verrinder's philippic. They
had seen her pass from incredulity to belief. They had seen her glance
at them and glance away in fear of them.

This broke them utterly, for she was utterly dear to them. She was
dearer than their own flesh and blood. She had replaced their dead.
She had been born to them without pain, without infancy, born full
grown in the prime of youth and beauty. They had watched her love grow
to a passion, and their own had grown with it.

What would she do now? She was the judge they feared above England.
They awaited her sentence.

Her eyes wandered to them and searched them through. At first, under
the spell of Verrinder's denunciation, she saw them as two bloated
fiends, their hands dripping blood, their lips framed to lies, their
brains to cunning and that synonym for Germanism, _ruthlessness_--the
word the Germans chose, as their Kaiser chose Huns for an ideal.

But she looked again. She saw the pleading in their eyes. Their very
uncomeliness besought her mercy. After all, she had seen none of the
things Verrinder described. The only real things to her, the o