“What you tell me about your gradual collapse coming on after the crisis of your troubles was over, and not during it, does not surprise me.  Nor am I puzzled by your malady increasing if, as I suppose, you are living idly.”

“I am.  I have no courage to do anything or see anybody.”

“Exactly.  You live in a sort of hiding.”

“Why—­yes.  You see, once I was well known to a good many people.  My troubles became known to them too.  I could not get rid of that burden I told you of except by blazoning them abroad.  I shrink from meeting any people now.  Therefore I live very quietly.  I—­”

Suddenly she seemed to grow tired of the half measures in frankness that had so far governed her communications.  She spread forth her hands with a very characteristic, ample gesture of sudden confidence.

“I think I’ll tell you exactly what it was,” she said.  “You may have read of me.  Long ago, some years at least, I was obliged to take action against my husband, a Mr. Wilson, who afterwards assumed the name of Marr.  I charged him with cruelty, won my case, and obtained a judicial separation.”

Then Dr. Levillier knew that he looked on the former wife of the strange, cruel, dead man, whose influence had entered into the lives of his two friends.

“You may have heard of my case?” Mrs. Wilson said.

“Certainly I have.”

“It was bad, even from a newspaper point of view, I believe.  People congratulated me on getting rid of a brute, and thought I was all right and ought to be happy.  But the newspapers and the world never knew what I had gone through, the real horrors, before I insisted on release.  You started when I called my husband a brute just now, Dr. Levillier; I noticed it.  The phrase hurt you, coming from any wife about any husband.  I know why, a boy once told me that his mother was always drunk.  He hurt me then into hating him for the rest of my days.  But I called a stranger a brute, not the man I loved and married, not the man I loved after I married him.  Dr. Levillier, do you believe in possessions?”

She had been gradually getting excited while she spoke, and, on the last words, she leaned forward in her chair and struck her hand down in her lap.

“Do you mean possession by the devil?” said the doctor, very quietly, opposing a strong calm to her intensity.

“Yes.  I do.  My experience obliges me to.  I knew, for a year before I married him, I married, I lived for two years after I married him, with a man who was my conception of what a man should be, strong, gentle, tender, brave, a hero to me.  I got rid of a devil, after I had endured two years of torture at his hands.  It is no use to tell me those two distinct men I knew were one and the same man.  My soul, my heart, declare that it’s a lie.  There were such differences.  My husband loved music; this man hated it; yet had the power to use it as a means of tormenting me.  But I