You can reach me at any time, day or night, through Meeghan’s
     Grocery—­Jefferson 4127.

The words sprang up at her, and she stared back at them fascinated.  The man at the Dabney House was certain that she would tell now.  He thought the resolution might come on her suddenly, as in the night.  Nominally, he left it to her; yet at the same time he contrived to make her feel caught in a trap, with no alternative, with this sense of enormous pressure upon her.  She remembered the man’s strange, stern words to her:  “You can’t be happy now, till you let the truth be known.”

All at once it seemed almost as if there were some one in the room with her.  She looked around hastily:  but of course there was no one.  She became very much frightened....

There came a knock on the door, and a voice: 

“Genaman in the parlor to see you, Miss Cyahlile.  Mist’ Avery.”

“I can’t come down.”

“Ma’am?”

“Say I’m not well and am lying down.”

In the hall below, the parlormaid Annie encountered Mrs. Heth, waked from her nap by the two rings at the bell.  Mrs. Heth ascended to Carlisle’s room and rattled the knob.

“Cally?...  Why, your door’s locked!”

The door opened, and Carlisle confronted her mother with a white tremulous face.

“What’s the matter?” said Mrs. Heth, gliding in with an expression of maternal solicitude.  “Annie said you weren’t well and were lying down.”

“I’m not well ...  Mamma, let’s go to New York to-morrow.”

“Go to-morrow!...  Why, what’s the matter?”

“Nothing.  Only I—­I’m so tired of being at home.”

Then her strained stiffness broke abruptly, and she flung her arms around her mother’s neck with an hysterical abandon by no means characteristic.

“Oh, I can’t stand it here another day. I can’t!  Please, please, mamma!  It must be not having Hugo.  I can’t explain—­it’s just the way I feel.  I’m so miserable here, I could die. Please, mamma!...”

Mrs. Heth, detecting with alarm the incipiences of a dangerous flare-up, said with startling gentleness: 

“There, there, dear!  Mamma will arrange it as you wish.”

     XIX

How it is One Thing to run away from yourself, and another to escape; how Cally orders the Best Cocktails, and gazes at her Mother asleep; also of Jefferson 4127, and why Mamma left the Table in a hurry at the Cafe des Ambassadeurs.

Mamma arranged it, by Amazonian effort.  New York, the colossal, received the runaway with an anonymous roar, asking no questions.  Here, in the late afternoon of the first day, safe forever in a well-furnished room on a seventeenth floor, Cally Heth made her answer to Dalhousie’s letter.  She formally cremated the scrawl in a pink saucer which had previously been doing nothing more useful in the world than holding up a toothbrush mug.