"Can you talk away facts? You robbed your cousin when he was trying to be your friend. That may mean nothing to you. It means a great deal to me," she cried passionately.
"Sho! An opera bouffe hold-up. I'll make it right with him when I see Captain Kilmeny."
"You admit you took the money?"
"Sure I took it. Had to have it in my business. If you'll sit down again and listen, neighbor, I'll tell you the whole story."
The amused assurance in his manner stirred resentment.
"No."
"Yes."
The clash of battle was in the meeting of their eyes. She had courage, just as he had, but she was fighting against her own desire.
"I have listened too often already," she protested.
"It hasn't hurt you any, has it?"
"Lady Farquhar thinks it has." The words slipped out before she could stop them, but as their import came home to her the girl's face flamed. "I mean that--that----"
"I know what you mean," he told her easily, a smile in his shrewd eyes. "You're a young woman--and I'm an ineligible man. So Lady Farquhar thinks we oughtn't to meet. That's all bosh. I'm not intending to make love to you, even though I think you're a mighty nice girl. But say I was. What then? Your friends can't shut you up in a glass cage if you're going to keep on growing. Life was made to be lived."
"Yes.... Yes.... That's what I think," she cried eagerly. "But it isn't arranged for girls that way--not if they belong to the class I do. We're shut in--chaperoned from everything that's natural. You don't know how I hate it."
"Of course you do. You're a live wire. That's why you're going to sit down and listen to me."
She looked him straight between the eyes. "But I don't think morality is only a convention, Mr. Kilmeny. 'Thou shalt not steal,' for instance."
"Depends what you steal. If you take from a man what doesn't belong to him you're doing the community a service. But we won't go into that now, though I'll just say this. What is right for me wouldn't be for Captain Kilmeny. As I told you before, our standards are different."
"Yes, you explained that to me just after you--while you were hiding from the officers after the first robbery," she assented dryly.
He looked at her and laughed. "You're prosecuting attorney and judge and jury all in one, aren't you?"
She held her little head uncompromisingly erect. Not again was she going to let her sympathy for him warp her judgment.
"I'm ready to hear what you have to say, Mr. Kilmeny."