She was able even to meet Prince Victor without her customary shiver of aversion; and when she recalled the persistence and enthusiasm with which she had reasoned herself into believing, last night, that he might be another than her father, she came as near to mirth as she was to come that day; but it was mirth bitter with self-derision.  Of course he was her father, she had been a ninny ever to dream contrariwise, or that it mattered.

Nor had she met with more success in efforts to find a cause for this drab humour; unless, indeed, it were simply the farthest swing of the pendulum from yesterday’s emotional crises, a long swing out of sunlit spaces swept by the brave winds of young romance into a gloomy zone of brooding torpor, whose calm was false, surcharged with unseizable disquiet, its atmosphere electrical with formless apprehensions, its sad twilight shot with lurid gleams no sooner glimpsed than gone.

In this state Sofia’s sensibilities were less benumbed than bound in a palsy of suspense not wholly destitute of dread; beneath the lethargic shallows of consciousness lay soundless deeps troubled by sinister premonitions....

Now, retracing stage by stage the record of the day, Sofia became aware that its most poignant moment for her was actually the present, with its keen wonder that she had contrived to survive such exquisite tedium.

She perceived that she had moved throughout like an automaton swayed by a will outside its own; functioning rather than living; performing appointed business, executing prescribed gestures, uttering foreordained observations, and making dictated responses, all without suggestion of spontaneity, and all without meaning other than as means to bridge an empty space of waiting.

Waiting for what?

Sofia could not guess....

She went to bed presently, hoping only to find surcease of boredom; and her head no sooner touched the pillow than oblivion closed down upon her faculties like a dense, dark cloud.

Discreet and well-instructed, Chou Nu turned the night-light down to a glimmer, placed on and under a chair adjacent to the bed a robe of cashmere that wouldn’t rustle, and slippers of fine felt with soles of soft leather, in which footfalls must be inaudible—­and glided gently from the room.

For sixty minutes its deep hush was unbroken; the even respiration of the girl made no sound, she rested without tossing, without moving a finger.

Then, sleep having held her for precisely one hour by the clock, Sofia opened her eyes, drew in a deep breath, and at once sat up on the side of the bed.

The memory of that hour was not to leave the girl while life was in her; nor was the question it raised ever to be answered in a fashion satisfactory to her intelligence.  When later she heard it stated with authority, by men reputed to be versed in psychic knowledge, that a subject in hypnosis cannot be willed to act contrary to the instincts of his or her better nature, she held her peace, but wondered.  Was Victor right, then, and the crime he had willed her to commit in final analysis not repugnant to her instincts?  Or was it some secret faculty of the soul, telepathy or of its kin, that roused and sent her to keep her rendezvous with destiny?