"At noon! To-day?"
"In about two hours. And I must say good-by to you. It's very sudden. I haven't even told my sister yet, though she's in the next room, here."
"I'll come down—that is—I'll try to." Amy felt weak, sick, sinking, suffocating in a whirl of doubts and fears. "You are going on business?"
"Yes," came the answer in a voice that rang false. "On business. I'll be away only a few weeks, I think."
"If I shouldn't be able to come—good-by," said Amy.
"But I hope— Let me come— Wouldn't that be better?"
Not a word about what she had said, when it ought to have put him into a quiver of anxiety; certainly, his going abroad looked like knowledge, guilt, flight. "No—no—you mustn't come," she commanded. "I'll do my best to get to you." And she added, "We might simply miss each other, if you didn't wait there."
"Please—Amy!"
She shivered. How far she had gone with him! And her father was right! "Good-by," she faltered, hastily ringing off.
If she could have seen him, her worst suspicions would have been confirmed; for his hair was mussed and damp with sweat, his skin looked as if he were in a garish light. He tried to compose himself, went in where his sister was at work—absorbed in making the drawings of a new kind of chimney-piece she had been thinking out. "Cis," he said, in an uncertain voice, "I'm off for Europe at noon."