I looked at my hand, and looked again; and as I looked I remembered something I had been reading only a few days before—­a profoundly unsettling description of an experiment in auto-suggestion.  The experiment had consisted of the placing of a hand upon a table, and the laying upon it the conjuration that, the Will notwithstanding, it should not move.  And as I watched my own hand, pale on the paper in the pearly light, I knew that, by some consent to the nullification of the Will that did not proceed from, the Self I was accustomed to regard as my own, that injunction was already placed upon it.  My. conscious and deliberate Will was powerless.  I could only sit there and wait until whatever inhibition had arrested my writing hand should permit it to move forward again.

It must have been several minutes before such a tingling of the nerves as announces that the blood is once more returning to a cramped member warned me that I was about to be released.  Warily I awaited my moment; then I plucked my hand to myself again with a suddenness that caused a little blot of ink to spurt from my fountain-pen on to the surface of the paper.  I drew a deep breath.  I was free again.  And with the freedom came a resolve—­that whatever portion of myself had been responsible for this prank should not repeat it if I could possibly prevent it.

But scarcely had I come, as I may say (and not without a little gush of alarm now that it was over), to myself, when I was struck by a thought.  It was a queer wild sort of thought.  It fetched me out of my chair and set me striding across the library to a lower shelf in the farthest corner.  This shelf was the shelf on which I kept my letter-files.  I stooped and ran my fingers along the backs of the dusty row.  I drew out the file for 1900, and brought it back to my writing-table.  My contracts, I ought to say, reposed in a deed-box at my agent’s office; but my files contained, in the form of my agent’s letters, a sufficient record of my business transactions.

I opened the file concertina-wise, and turned to the section lettered “R.”  I drew out the correspondence that related to the sale of the first series of the Martin Renards.  As I did so I glanced at the movable calendar on my table.  The date was January 20th.

The file contained no letters for January of any significance whatever.

The thought that had half formed in my brain immediately became nonsense.  I replaced the letters in their compartment, and took the file back to its shelf again.  For some minutes I paced the library irresolutely; then I decided I would work no more that night.  When I gathered together my papers I was careful to place that with the half-finished sentence on the top, so that with the first resting of my eyes upon it on the morrow my memory might haply be refreshed.

I tried again to finish that sentence on the morrow.  With certain modifications that I need not particularise here, my experience was the same as on the previous night.