THE YELLOW DOVE
secret message of Captain Byfield. I knew too much. If I had told my friends in England what I knew, his utility to England would have been gone.”
“Why? It seems to me that having my confidence would have made his utility to England the greater.”
“He would have been suspected of double dealing, would he not?”
“As a friend of England you would have let him be suspected?” he asked quietly. “Given evidence against a man whom you knew to be acting in England’s interests?”
“There were other—other—interests,” she faltered, “more important to me than England’s—Mr. Hammersley’s. You have a daughter, Excellenz. Perhaps you would try to think of me as you would think of her in a similar situation. When I read those papers at Ashwater Park I knew that the man to whom I was promised and of whom I had always thought as an Englishman was acting as a secret agent—a spy of Germany. He was pursued by agents of the English War Office. I knew that if his connection with Germany were discovered he would be shot. I was frightened. I did not know what to do. John Rizzio followed me to Scotland and tried to get the papers. I refused to give them to him. And then when—when Mr. Hammersley came I burned them. There was nothing left for me to do—for England—for him. If there were no papers there could be no evidence against him.”
She paused to get her breath, aware that her companion was listening intently, and fearfully afraid that she was saying too much.
“And then—?” he asked.
“And then,” she went on more slowly, “I found the
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