“Oh, there are plenty of trains,” she said.  “You mustn’t bother.—­Why, Wallace Hood has a sister living in Omaha. (Wallace Hood, not James Wallace.  It would be terrible if you confused them.) She’s been trying for months to find a nursery governess.  And I’ve been trying—­perhaps you didn’t know; the family have been very unpleasant about it—­to find a job.—­Oh, for the most realistic of reasons, among others.  Well, it occurred to me the other day that Wallace’s sister and I might be looking for each other.”

There she paused, but only for a moment.  Then she added, very explicitly, “So I’m going to Omaha to-morrow.”

Even her lying she had to do honestly.  She preferred, he saw, that he should remember she had lied to having him recall that she had tricked him by an evasion.

One need not invoke clairvoyance to account for his incandescent certainty that she had lied.  The mere unconscious synthesis of the things she had said and left unsaid along the earlier stages of their talk, would have amounted to a demonstration.  Her moment of panic over his discovery that she was saying good-by, her irrespressible shudder at the question whether she was going away in the ordinary literal sense of the phrase; finally, her pitiful attempt to avoid, in answer to his last question, a categorical untruth and then her acceptance of it as, after all, preferable to the other.  But it was by no such pedestrian process as this that he reached the truth.

He knew, now, why he had been terrified from the moment she came into the room.  He knew why she had wrung that promise from him—­a death-bed promise she had dared with a smile to call it—­that he would not, whatever happened, destroy The Dumb Princess.  It would be a likely enough thing for him to do, she had perceived, when he learned the truth.  She could not—­sleep, she had told him, until that surmise was laid.

There were, as she had said, plenty of trains to that unknown destination of hers, but he thought that that word sleep offered the true clue.  She was a physician’s daughter; there must be, somewhere in that house, a chest or cupboard that would supply what she needed.  They’d find her in her own bed, in that room he had once cast a glance into on his way up-stairs to Paula.

The conviction grew upon him that she had her plans completely laid; yes, and her preparations accomplished.  That quiet leisureliness of hers would not have been humanly possible if either her resolution or the means for executing it had remained in doubt.  It was likely that she had whatever it was—­a narcotic, probably; morphine; she wouldn’t, conceivably, resort to any of the corrosives—­upon her person at this moment.  In that little silken bag which hung from her wrist.

He clenched the finger-nails into the palms of his hands.  This thing was a nightmare.  He had fallen asleep over his table; had only to wake himself.—­It would not do to play with an idea like that.  Nor with the possibility that he had misread her mind.  He knew.  He was not mistaken.  Let him never glance aside from that.