Suddenly Mrs. Beecher Monmouth ceased her scrutiny and broke into a laugh, a long tinkle of laughter that showed all her fine teeth.
"What a boy you are," she said. "Do you remember that night when you swore and tore about this room like a madman?" She laughed again, as though in memory of a scene that had been grotesquely ridiculous. Somehow, in that moment John felt his instinctive dislike of her intensify. He saw her as an utterly cold-blooded traitor to her country. Only forty-eight hours earlier she had slipped into his hand information that had been intended to doom a great ship to disaster. The slip of paper that had so astoundingly come into his possession had in itself constituted a vile blow at the safety of England. And here was the woman who had safely engineered that atrocity, who had acted as an intermediary in Germany's pay. And this same woman was smiling at him in her Grosvenor Place boudoir, surrounded by all the luxuries of life, the wife of a politician of some eminence, who had only recently been in the running for an under-secretaryship.
The thought flashed into John's mind--was Beecher Monmouth, M.P., also a traitor? He did not know. But he was prepared to risk a good deal to find out.
Once more he turned his attention to the woman before him.
"It was rather weak of me," he said, "to act the way I did."
"It was as good as a melodrama," replied she. "You said you were ruined, and swore you'd end everything! I forget whether it was to be the river or in some less pleasant manner. Called yourself a traitor----"
"Traitor!" repeated John--he wanted to know more of this.
"Melodrama again," responded Mrs. Beecher Monmouth. "However, you calmed yourself in the end. You became your own delightful, foolish self again."
"Thanks," said John, and for the life of him he could not help saying aloud, "and you were able to twist me round your pretty fingers!"
She looked at him with one of her quick looks.
"Now, that is delightful of you to say pretty things to me. Do you know," she continued, leaning towards him, "you have improved immensely--you are quite changed! Before you really came to us," she adopted a note of seriousness, "you were really too dreadful for words. You raved against the army, that had treated you so abominably, and yet would not throw in your lot with us. Oh, you were very difficult, _mon ami_!"