"Oh, I'll get out all right," he affirmed with a confidence he did not feel. "I'm going to get you out of this or die in the attempt. Sh! Don't oppose me," he went on whimsically. "I've always wanted to be a hero, and here's my chance. Now tell me what happened to you."
Her piquant, ever-sprightly face had lost the arrogance that had troubled all his dreams of conquest. She was pale and shivering and so sorely distressed that he had it in his heart to clasp her in his arms as one might do in trying to soothe a frightened child. Her face grew cloudy with the effort to concentrate her thoughts; a piteous frown settled upon her brow.
"I'm not sure that I can recall everything. It is all so terrible—so unaccountable. It's like a dream that you try to remember and cannot. Finding you here in this place is really the strangest part of it. I cannot believe that I am awake."
She looked long and anxiously into his face, her eyebrows drawn together in an earnest squint of uncertainty. "Oh, Mr. King, I have had such a dreadful—dreadful time. Am I awake?"
"That's what I've been asking of myself," he murmured. "I guess we're both awake all right. Nightmares don't last forever."
Her story came haltingly; he was obliged to supply many of the details by conjecture, she was so hazy and vague in her memory.
At the beginning of the narrative, however, Truxton was raised to unusual heights; he felt such a thrill of exaltation that for the moment he forgot his and her immediate peril. In a perfectly matter-of-fact manner she was informing him that her search for him had not been abandoned until Baron Dangloss received a telegram from Paris, stating that King was in a hospital there, recovering from a wound in the head.
"You can imagine what I thought when I saw you here a little while, ago," she said, again looking hard at his face as if to make sure. "We had looked everywhere for you. You see, I was ashamed. That man from Cook's told us that you were hurt by—by the way I treated you the day before you disappeared, and—well, he said you talked very foolishly about it."
He drew a long breath. Somehow he was happier than he had been before. "Hobbs is a dreadful ass," he managed to say.
It seems that the ministry was curiously disturbed by the events attending the disappearance of the Countess Ingomede. The deception practised upon John Tullis, frustrated only by the receipt of a genuine message from the Countess, was enough to convince the authorities that something serious was afoot. It may have meant no more than the assassination of Tullis at the hands of a jealous husband; or it may have been a part of the vast conspiracy which Dangloss now believed to be in progress of development.