Watching her as her unfocused reminiscent gaze made it easy for him to do, he saw her go suddenly pale, saw the perspiration bead out on her forehead as if some thought her mind had found itself confronting actually sickened her.  He waited an instant, breathless in an agony of doubt whether to notice or to go on pretending to ignore.  After a moment the wave passed.

“I know that was a figure of speech,” she resumed,—­her voice was deadened a little in timbre but its inflections were as light as before.  “But I wish—­I’d really be ever so much—­happier—­if you’d give me a promise; a perfectly serious, solemn,”—­she hesitated for a word and smiled,—­“death-bed promise, that you never will burn up The Dumb Princess.  At least until she’s all published and produced.  And I wish that as soon as you’ve got a copy made, you’d put this manuscript in a really safe place.”

He turned away from her, baffled, bewildered.  She had evaded the issue he had tried to confront her with.  She had taken the passionate declaration of his wish to retrieve the great error of his life as a passing emotion familiar to all creative artists at certain stages in their work.  It was a natural, almost inevitable, way of looking at it!  He sat for a moment gazing abstractedly at his littered table, clutching the edges of it with both hands, resisting a momentary vertigo of his own.

She left her chair and came and stood beside him.  She picked up one of the quires of manuscript, opened it and gazed a while at the many-staved score.  He was aware of a catch in her breathing, like an inaudible sob, but presently she spoke, quite steadily.

“I wish I could sit here to-night and read this.  I wish it made even unheard melodies to me.  I’m not dumb but I am deaf to this. There’s a spell beyond your powers to lift, my dear.”

She laid her hand lightly upon his shoulder and at her touch his taut-drawn muscles relaxed into a tremulous weakness.  After a little silence: 

“Now give me my promise,” she said.

He did not immediately answer and the hand upon his shoulder took hold.  Under its compulsion, “I’ll promise anything you ask,” he said.

She spoke slowly as if measuring her words.  “Never to destroy this work of yours that you call The Dumb Princess whatever may conceivably happen, however discouraged you may be about it.”

“Very well,” he said, “I won’t.”

“Say it as a promise,” she commanded.  “Quite explicitly.”

So he repeated a form of words which satisfied her.  She held him tight in both hands for an instant.  Then swiftly went back to her chair.

“Don’t think me too foolish,” she apologized.  “I haven’t been sleeping much of late and I couldn’t have slept to-night with a misgiving like that to wonder about.”

His own misgiving obscurely deepened.  He did not know whether it was the reason she had offered for exacting that promise from him or the mere tone of her voice which was lighter and more brittle than he felt it should have been.  She must have read the troubled look in his face for she said at once and on a warmer note: