if the idea amused him. "As an Olympian? No, if
I had a mountain it wouldn't be that one. But I like the valleys
better, anyhow."

"I know," she said contentedly. Then her voice darkened. "I'm just at
the beginning of you--now..." The sentence ended unnaturally, though he
had done nothing to interrupt it.

Deliberately he startled her. "What time does your train go, to-morrow?"
he asked. "Or haven't you selected one? You haven't even told me where it
is you are going."

Through his hands which held her he felt the shock, the momentary agony
of the effort to recover the threatened balance, the resolute relaxation
of the muscles and the steadying breath she drew.

"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, wh