But Lily’s problem was too complex for Pink’s simple remedy.  She was stricken with sudden conviction; the very mention of Willy Cameron gave Pink’s statements authority.  But to go like that, to leave Elinor in that house, with all that it implied, was impossible.  And there was her own private problem to dispose of.

“I’ll go this afternoon, Pink.  I’ll promise you that.  But I can’t go with you now.  I can’t.  You’ll have to take my word, that’s all.  And you must believe I didn’t know.”

“Of course you didn’t know,” he said, sturdily.  “But I hate like thunder to go and leave you here.”  He picked up his hat, reluctantly.  “If I can do anything—­”

Lily’s mind was working more clearly now.  This was the thing Louis Akers had been concerned with, then, a revolution against his country.  But it was the thing, too, that he had promised to abandon.  He was not a killer.  She knew him well, and he was not a killer.  He had got to a certain point, and then the thing had sickened him.  Even without her he would never have gone through with it.  But it would be necessary now to get his information quickly.  Very quickly.

“Suppose,” she said, hesitatingly, “suppose I tell you that I think I am going to be able to help you before long?”

“Help?  I want you safe.  This is not work for women.”

“But suppose I can bring you a very valuable ally?” she persisted.  “Some one who knows all about certain plans, and has changed his views about them?”

“One of them?”

“He has been.”

“Is he selling his information?”

“In a way, yes,” said Lily, slowly.

“Ware the fellow who sells information,” Pink said.  “But we’ll be glad to have it.  We need it, God knows.  And—­you’ll leave?”

“I couldn’t stay, could I?”

He kissed her hand when he went away, doing it awkwardly and self-consciously, but withal reverently.  She wondered, rather dully, why she could not love Pink.  A woman would be so safe with him, so sure.

She had not even then gathered the full force of what he had told her.  But little by little things came back to her; the man on guard in the garden; the incident of the locked kitchen door; Jim Doyle once talking angrily over a telephone in his study, although no telephone, so far as she knew, was installed in the room; his recent mysterious absences, and the increasing visits of the hateful Woslosky.

She went back to Louis.  This was what he had meant.  He had known all along, and plotted with them; even if his stomach had turned now, he had been a party to this infamy.  Even then she did not hate him; she saw him, misled as she had been by Doyle’s high-sounding phrases, lured on by one of those wild dreams of empire to which men were sometimes given.  She did not love him any more; she was sorry for him.