"Oh, but there is!" she put in quickly. "I want you to get a cab and take me to the station. I'm leaving for California. Don't you want to go with me?"
"God forbid!" I exclaimed, and it came out of a full heart. Then I went down to order the cab.
She was curiously silent on the short drive down Seventeenth Street to the Union Station, sitting with the little hand-bag on her knees and breathing as they say the Australian pearl fishers breathe before taking the deep-sea dive. In the station she stood at a window in the women's room and waited while I purchased her ticket for San Francisco and paid for the sleeper section which had evidently been reserved some time in advance.
It is perhaps needless to say that I did not buy my own California ticket at the same time, though the train she was taking was the one I had planned to take. My journey could be postponed; and in the light of what had happened, and what was now happening, I was beginning to understand that my runaway trip to the Pacific Coast was no longer necessary, on one account, at least. But in any event, wild horses couldn't have dragged me aboard of the same train with Agatha Geddis.
She seemed strangely perturbed when I went to her with the tickets, and she made no move to leave the window.
"Your train is ready," I told her, as she thrust the ticket envelope into the bosom of her gown.
"Wait!" she commanded; then she turned back to the window which looked out upon the cab rank.
There were cabs coming and going constantly, and I didn't know until afterward what she saw that made her eyes light up and the blood surge into her cheeks.
"Now I'm ready," she announced quickly. "Put me on the sleeper."
I took her through the gates and at the gate-man's halting of us I saw that we were followed.