"Oh, but I saw her doing it, sir, and I wondered what was the matter with the letter; only I did n't notice the postage stamp, or I'd have spoken."
Carroll knew that Abby was as well aware as was he of Alice's invincible truthfulness, and that he had not to reckon with any unfounded suspicion of deceit. If Alice had said she did not know who destroyed the letter, then it was evident that she had done it unconsciously and in some condition which needed to be inquired into. He leaned back against the mantel, and playing absently with the dangling prisms which hung above a brazen pair of pastoral lovers on the old-fashioned candelabra, he heard Abby's story in full. Miss Gaylord had said to the servant that she was about to write the letter, and that it must be posted that evening.
Going to the parlor after the note, Abby had seen her mistress cut it to pieces. The maid withdrew, supposing that for some reason the note needed rewriting; but on returning some time later, she had been met by the declaration that it was on the table. As it was not there, her mistress had joined in searching for it, but nothing could be found save the fragments in the waste-basket. Miss Gaylord had insisted that she had not cut it, and that she was entirely ignorant of how the damage had occurred.
Dr. Carroll was puzzled and troubled, nor was he less so when Alice had given him her account. She did this unsolicited, and with evident frankness.
"I suppose, George," she said, "it's absent-mindedness; but if I have got so far that I don't know what I'm doing, I'd better be shut up for a lunatic at once."
"Has anything of the sort ever happened before?" he asked.
"I am not sure," was her answer; "but sometimes I've found things done that I could not remember doing: my clothes put in queer places, and that sort of thing, you know. I never really thought much about it before. You don't think--"
He could see that she was seriously troubled, and he set himself to dissipate her concern.
"I think you are tired, and so you may be a little absent-minded; but I certainly do not think it's worth making any fuss about. You and Abby will have a theory of demoniacal possession soon, to account for a mere slip of memory."
He did not leave her until it seemed to him that she no longer regarded the incident seriously; but in his own mind he was by no means at ease. At the earliest moment possible he went to consult with a fellow physician who was a specialist in disorders of the nerves, and to him he told the whole case as accurately as he was able. The specialist put some questions and in the end asked:--
"Has she ever been hypnotized?"
"I'm sure she never has," Carroll answered. "She might easily be a subject, I should think. She's naturally nervous, and just now she is run down and unstrung."
"It seems like a case of self-hypnotism," the other said. "Sometimes, you know, patients unconsciously hypnotize themselves, or get hypnotized, without having any idea of it."
"But would n't she know it afterward?"
"Oh, no; the second personality generally knows all about the first--"
"You mean," interrupted Carroll, "that the normal person is the first and the hypnotized is the second?"
"Yes. The personality that comes to the surface in hypnotism, the subliminal self, knows all about the normal person, but the normal person has no idea of the existence of the secondary, the subliminal personality."
"It's so cheerful to think of yourself as a sort of nest of boxes,"
Carroll commented grimly, "one personality inside of the other, and you only knowing about the outside box."
"Or you _being_ only the outside box, perhaps," the specialist responded, with a smile. "Well, what we don't know would fill rather a good-sized book."
The suggestion of hypnotism remained in Carroll's mind, and it was not many days before he had a sufficiently plain but altogether disagreeable confirmation of the specialist's theory. He was with Alice in the old drawing-room, a place of quaint primness, with fine, staid Copley portraits, and an air of self-respecting propriety utterly at variance with psychical mysteries. He stood gazing out of the window, while Alice moved about the room looking for a book of which they had been speaking, and his eye was caught by a sparkling point of light on the sunlit wall of the house opposite. He made some casual remark in regard to it, and Alice came to look over his shoulder.
"What is it?" she asked.
"It must be a grain of sand in the mortar, I suppose," he answered. "It is making a tremendous effect for such a little thing."
She did not answer for an instant. Then she burst into a laugh which to him sounded strange and unpleasant, and clapped her hands.
"Well, I've come," she said joyously.
He wheeled quickly toward her. Her face seemed to have undergone a change, slight yet extraordinary. She was laughing with a glee that was not without a suspicion of malice, and she met his look with a boldness so different from the usual regard of Alice as to seem almost brazen.
He could see that his evident bewilderment amused her greatly. A mischievous twinkle lighted her glance.
"Oh, of course you think I'm she; but I'm not. I'm a good deal nicer.
She's a tiresome old thing, anyway. You'd like me a great deal better."
Carroll was entirely too confused to speak, but he was a physician, and could not help reflecting instantly upon the cause of this strange metamorphosis. He naturally thought of hypnotism, and he came in a second thought to realize that Alice had with amazing rapidity been sent into a hypnotic condition by looking for an instant at the glittering point on the wall of the house across the street. What the result might be, or what the words she spoke meant, he could not even conjecture.
"Don't stare at me so," the girl went on. "I'm Jenny."
"Oh," he repeated confusedly, "you're Jenny?"
"Yes; I'm Jenny, and I'm worth six of that silly Alice you're engaged to."
He took her lightly by the shoulders and looked at her, quite as much for the sake of steadying his own nerves as from any expectation of learning anything by examination. Her eyes shone with an unwonted brightness, and seemed to him to gleam with an archness of which Alice would not have been capable. The cheeks were flushed, not feverishly, but healthily, and the girl had lost completely the appearance of exhaustion which had troubled him so long. The head was carried with a new erectness, and as he regarded her she tossed it saucily.
"You may look at me as much as you like," she said gayly. "I can stand it. Don't you think I am better looking than she is?"
He was convinced that Alice could not know what she was saying, yet he involuntarily cried out:--
"Don't, Alice! I don't like it!"
She pouted her lips, lips which to his excited fancy seemed to have grown redder and fuller than he had ever seen them, and she made a droll little grimace.
"I'm not Alice, I tell you. Kiss me."
In all their long engagement Alice had never asked him for a caress, and the request hurt him now as something unwomanly. Instead of complying, he dropped his hands and turned away. She laughed shrilly.
"Oh, you won't kiss me? I thought it was polite to do what a lady asked!
Well, if you won't now, you will some time. You'll want to when you know me better."
She moved away, but he caught her by the arm.
"Stop!" he ordered her, with all the determination he could put into the word. "Wake up, Alice! Be done with this fooling!"
The bright face grew anxious and the pouting lips beseeching.
"Don't send me away! I'll be good! Don't make her come back!"
"Alice," he repeated, clasping her arm firmly, "wake up!"
"You hurt me!" she cried half whiningly. "You hurt me! I'll go."
The wild brightness faded from the eyes, a change too subtle to be defined seemed to come over the whole figure, the old tired expression spread like mist over the face, and the familiar Alice stood there, passing her hand over her eyes.
"What is the matter?" she asked, in a startled way. "Did I faint?"
He was conscious that his look must have alarmed her, and he made a desperate effort to speak easily and naturally.
"I guess you came mighty near it," he answered, as naturally as he could. "It's all right now."