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.

"Development!" Truxton King had exclaimed at this point in her
narrative. "Good God, if Dangloss only knew what I know!"

There had been a second brief message from the Countess. She admitted
that she was with her husband at the Axphain capital. This message came
to Tullis and was to the effect that she and the Count were leaving
almost immediately for a stay at Biarritz in France. "Mr. King," said
the narrator, "the Countess lied. They did not go to Biarritz. I am
convinced now that she is in the plot with that vile old man. She may
even expect to reign in Graustark s