“Does Miss Ward know—­”

“Do you think it likely?  One of the most convenient things about a chateau is the number of ways to get out of it without being seen.  I had a choice of eight.  So I ‘suffered fearfully from neuralgia,’ dined in my own room, and sped through the woods to my honest forester.”  She nodded brightly.  “That’s you!”

“You weren’t afraid to come through the woods alone?” I asked, uncomfortably conscious that her gaiety met a dull response from me.

“No.”

“But if Miss Ward finds that you’re not at the chateau—­”

“She won’t; she thinks I’m asleep.  She brought me up a sleeping-powder herself.”

“She thinks you took it?”

“She knows I did,” said Miss Elliott.  “I’m full of it!  And that will be the reason—­if you notice that I’m particularly nervous or excited.”

“You seem all of that,” I said, looking at her eyes, which were very wide and very brilliant.  “However, I believe you always do.”

“Ah!” she smiled.  “I knew you thought me atrocious from the first.  You find MYRIADS of objections to me, don’t you?”

I had forgotten to look away from her eyes, and I kept on forgetting.  (The same thing had happened several times lately; and each time, by a somewhat painful coincidence, I remembered my age at precisely the instant I remembered to look away.) “Dazzling” is a good old-fashioned word for eyes like hers; at least it might define their effect on me.

“If I did manage to object to you,” I said slowly, “it would be a good thing for me—­wouldn’t it?”

“Oh, I’ve Won!” she cried.

“Won?” I echoed.

“Yes.  I laid a wager with myself that I’d have a pretty speech from you before I went out of your life”—­she checked a laugh, and concluded thrillingly—­“forever!  I leave Quesnay to-morrow!”

“Your father has returned from America?”

“Oh dear, no,” she murmured.  “I’ll be quite at the world’s mercy.  I must go up to Paris and retire from public life until he does come.  I shall take the vows—­in some obscure but respectable pension.”

“You can’t endure the life at the chateau any longer?”

“It won’t endure me any longer.  If I shouldn’t go to-morrow I’d be put out, I think—­after to-night!”

“But you intimated that no one would know about to-night!”

“The night isn’t over yet,” she replied enigmatically.

“It almost is—­for you,” I said; “because in ten minutes I shall take you back to the chateau gates.”

She offered no comment on this prophecy, but gazed at me thoughtfully and seriously for several moments.  “I suppose you can imagine,” she said, in a tone that threatened to become tremulous, “what sort of an afternoon we’ve been having up there?”

“Has it been—­” I began.

“Oh, heart-breaking!  Louise came to my room as soon as they got back from here, this morning, and told me the whole pitiful story.  But they didn’t let her stay there long, poor woman!”