"What now?" asked the girl, her eyes hard. "We're caught," said Cartaret. She could only repeat the word: "Caught?" "Yes. I'm sorry. It was my stupidity; I suppose I jolted the door rather hard when I bumped into it, doing that tango just now. Anyhow, this old lock's sprung into action and we're fastened in." The girl looked at him sharply. A difficult red climbed her cheeks. "Open that door," she ordered. "But I can't--not right away. I'll have to try to----" "Open that door instantly." "But I tell you I can't. Don't you see?" He pointed to the offending deadlatch. In embarrassed sentences, he explained the situation. She did not appear to listen. She had the air of one who has prejudged a case. "You are trying to keep me in this room," she said. Her tone was steady, and her eyes were brave; but it was evident that she quite believed her statement. Cartaret colored in his turn. "Nonsense," said he. "Then open the door." "I tell you the lock has slipped." "If that is so, use your key." "I haven't any key," protested Cartaret. "And even if I had----" "You have no key to your own room?" She raised her eyes scornfully. "I understood you to say very positively that I was trespassing in _your_ room." "Great Scott!" cried Cartaret. "Of course it's my room. You make me wish it wasn't, but it is. It is my room, but you can see for yourself there's no keyhole to the confounded lock on this side of the door, and never was. Look here." Again he pointed to the deadlatch: "If you'll only come a little nearer and look----" "Thank you," she said. "I shall remain where I am." She had put her hand among the lace over her breast; now the hand, withdrawn, held an unsheathed knife. "And if you come one step nearer to me," she calmly concluded, "I will kill you." It was the sole dream-touch needed to perfect his sense of the entire episode's unreality. In his poor room, a princess that he had never seen before--that, surely, he was not seeing now!--some royal figure out of a lost Hellenic tragedy; her breast visibly cumbered by the heavy air of modern Paris, her wonderful eyes burning with the cold fire of resolution, she told him that she would kill him if he approached her. And she would do it; she would kill him with less compunction than she would feel in crushing an offending moth! Cartaret had instinctively jumped at the first flash of the weapon. Now his laughter returned. A vision could not be impeded by a sprung lock. "But you're not here," he said. She did not shift by so much as a hairbreadth her position of defense, yet, ever so slightly, her eyes widened. "And I'm not, either," he persisted. "Don't you see? Things like this don't happen. One of us is asleep and dreaming--and I must be that one." Plainly she did not follow him, but his laughter had been so boyishly innocent as to make her patently doubtful of her own assumption. He crowded that advantage. "Honestly," he said, "I didn't mean any harm----"