love with her--hopelessly. She's one of those devilish sirens that no
full-blooded man can resist and, the extraordinary part of it is, she
fell in love with him--genuinely in love.

"Well--it was a bad business. This officer gave the woman all he had,
told her all he knew, and finally he asked her to marry him. Yes. He
didn't care what she was. He just wanted her. And she was so happy, so
crazy about him, that she almost yielded; she was ready to turn over a
new leaf, to settle down as his wife, but--"

"But she didn't do it?" I smiled.

The Admiral shook his head.

"He was a poor man--just a lieutenant's pay and she couldn't give up her
grand life. But she loved him enough to try to save him, enough to leave
him. She wrote him a wonderful letter, poured her soul out to him, gave
him certain military secrets of the government she was working for--they
would have shot her in a minute, you understand, if they had known
it--and she told him to take this information as a proof of her love and
use it to save the United States."

I was listening now with absorbed interest.

"What government was she working for?"

The Admiral paused to relight his cigar.

"Wait! The next thing was that this lieutenant came to me, as a friend of
his father and an admiral of the American fleet, and made a clean breast