Verrinder left the physician to fabricate and promulgate the story and keep him out of it. Then he addressed himself to the remaining prisoner, Miss Marie Louise Webling. He had no desire to display this minnow as his captive after the whales had got away, but he hoped to find her useful in solving some of the questions the Weblings had left unanswered when they bolted into eternity. Besides, he had no intention of letting Marie Louise escape to warn the other conspirators and to continue her nefarious activities. His first difficulty was not one of frightening Miss Webling into submission, but of soothing her into coherence. She had loved the old couple with a filial passion, and the sight of their last throes had driven her into a frenzy of grief. She needed the doctor's care before Verrinder could talk to her at all. The answers he elicited from her hysteria were full of contradiction, of evident ignorance, of inaccuracy, of folly. But so he had found all human testimony; for these three things are impossible to mankind: to see the truth, to remember it, and to tell it. When first Marie Louise came out of the avalanche of her woes, it was she who began the questioning. She went up and down the room disheveled, tear-smirched, wringing her hands and beating her breast till it hurt Verrinder to watch her brutality to that tender flesh. "What--what does it mean?" she sobbed. "What have you done to my poor papa and mamma? Why did you come here?" "Surely you must know." "What do I know? Only that they were good sweet people." "Good sweet spies!" "Spies! Those poor old darlings?" "Oh, I say--really, now, you surely can't have the face, the insolence, to--" "I haven't any insolence. I haven't anything but a broken heart." "How many hearts were broken--how many hearts were stopped, do you suppose, because of your work?" "My what?" "I refer to the lives that you destroyed." "I--I destroyed lives? Which one of us is going mad?" "Oh, come, now, you knew what you were doing. You were glad and proud for every poor fellow you killed." "It's you, then, that are mad." She stared at him in utter fear. She made a dash for the door. He prevented her. She fell back and looked to the window. He took her by the arm and twisted her into a chair. He had seen hysteria quelled by severity. He stood over her and spoke with all the sternness of his stern soul. "You will gain nothing by trying to make a fool of me. You carried messages for those people. The last messages you took you delivered to one of our agents." Her soul refused her even self-defense. She could only stammer the fact, hardly believing it as she put it forth: "I didn't know what was in the letters. I never knew." Verrinder was disgusted by such puerile defense: "What did you think was in them, then?" "I had no idea. Papa--Sir Joseph didn't take me into his confidence." "But you knew that they were secret."