"He is dead,—didn't you hear?"
"No." Eileen sat in shocked silence. "I am sorry," she murmured at length. But underneath this mild shock she was conscious—as they rolled on without speaking—of a new ease that had come into her life: some immense relaxation of tension. "A hunted criminal must breathe more calmly when he is caught," she thought.
XIX
"Lucky I'm in evening dress," she said, loosening her cloak as they went through a corridor, shimmering with dresses and diamonds, to a crowded supper-room.
"But you're always in evening dress, surely."
"I might have been in tights." And she had a malicious self-wounding pleasure in watching him gasp. She hurried into a revelation of her exact position, as soon as they had secured a just-vacated little table in a window niche. She omitted only Colonel Doherty.
He listened breathlessly. "And nobody knows you are Eileen O'Keeffe, I mean Nelly O'Neill?"
She laughed. "You see you don't know which I am."
"It's incredible."