Upon investigation she was proved to be a British subject in the Hun employ. Her motives for having turned traitor and spy were said to have been inspired by her resentment at the injustice of her birth; she was the illegitimate daughter of an Englishman of title, had been well-educated, kept always abroad in the care of strangers and had been given to understand through her father’s lawyers that the moment she tried to hold direct communication with her father’s family her income would end. How much of this Dragott knew when he married her was not certain. He was a kindly, honourable, wellborn man and had arrived at an age when men attain a wise leniency of view towards social accidents. He became extremely fond of her and brought her back to England. She saw her native country for the first time in his company, and she saw it as a spy in the pay of Germany. After her husband’s death, it was German money which had maintained the elegant extravagance of the little house in Mayfair. Up to this point her story called more for sympathy than condemnation. If she, an Englishwoman, was England’s enemy, it was the unkindness of English laws that had made her that. The loneliness and family ostracism of her girlhood, when combined with her more than ordinary beauty of body and brilliancy of mind, had warped her nature into a bitter desire to be revenged. How much her husband or any of her subsequent suitors had guessed of her real occupation it was difficult to establish; but there was evidence which indicated that more than one of them had suspected. She herself had made the statement that long before her husband’s death she had tried to break off her relations with Berlin, but had been compelled to continue them under threats. Her war-philanthropies had not been entirely camouflage; in particular a hospital, which she had established in France, had been the attempt of an unquiet conscience to make atonement. But she had found it impossible to disentangle herself from the web of intrigue in which she was caught. Whatever she did, whether her intentions were good or bad, was converted into a means of gathering information for the enemy. She emphatically denied that she had had any accomplices; none of the men who had been in love with her had wilfully betrayed their official secrets. It was because she had not wished to involve others in her own tragedy that she had persistently refused all offers of marriage, earning for herself the reputation of being the coldest woman in London. Above all things she denied that she had had anything to do with Barton’s death.