“Well,” said Miss Vaughan, with a deep breath, sitting down again and motioning us to follow her example, “it seems to me that you have a story to tell, too!  But I’ll tell mine first.  Where shall I begin?”

“Begin,” I suggested, “at the moment when you first suspected the plot.”

“That was when you were telling me of Fred’s arrest.  When you told me of the handkerchief and then of the finger-prints, I knew that someone was plotting against him.  And then, quite suddenly, I thought of something.”

“You jumped up,” I said, “as though you were shot, and ran to the book-case over there and got down that album of finger-prints, and found that Swain’s were missing.  That seemed to upset you completely.”

“It did; and I will tell you why.  My father, for many years, had been a collector of finger-prints.  All of his friends were compelled to contribute; and whenever he made a new acquaintance, he got his prints, too, if he could.  He believed that one’s character was revealed in one’s finger-prints, and he studied them very carefully.  It was a sort of hobby; but it was, for some reason, distasteful to Senor Silva.  He not only refused to allow prints to be made of his fingers, but he pooh-poohed my father’s theories, and they used to have some terrific arguments about it.  One night, after a particularly hot argument, Senor Silva made the assertion that he could, by hypnotic suggestion, cause his servant Mahbub to reproduce any finger-prints he desired.  Mahbub’s finger-tips had been manipulated in some way, when he was a child, so that they showed only a series of straight lines.”

“Yes,” I said, “his prints were taken at the inquest.”

“Father said that if Senor Silva could show him proof of that assertion, he would never look at finger-prints again.  Senor Silva asked for a week in which to make a study of the prints, in order to impress them upon his memory; at the end of that time, the test was made.  It was a most extraordinary one.  Senor Silva, father, and I sat at the table yonder, under the light, with the book of prints before us.  Mahbub was placed at a little table in the far corner, with his back to us, and Senor Silva proceeded to hypnotise him.  It took only a moment, for he could hypnotise Mahbub by pointing his finger at him.  He said Mahbub was a splendid subject, because he had hypnotised him hundreds of times, and had him under perfect control.  Then he placed an ink-pad on the table in front of him—­nothing else.  My father wrote his name and the date upon the top sheet of a pad of paper, and Senor Silva placed it before Mahbub.  Then he sat down with us, selected a page of prints, and asked us to concentrate our minds upon it.  At the end of a few moments, he asked me to bring the pad from before Mahbub.  I did so, and we found the prints upon it to be identical with those on the page we had been looking at.  My father touched them with his finger and found that they were fresh, as the ink smeared readily.  His name was on the corner of the page, where he had written it.  There could be no doubt that in some way Mahbub had been able to duplicate the prints.