needn’t dwell on the evidences of change.  Suffice it to say that the thing that crushed me, the thing that has brought me down into the dust where I am, dust of cowardice, and weakness, and impotence to do or to be anything, was the horror of awakening to a knowledge of that change, of having to live as wife with this devil, whom I knew not, who was a stranger to me.  Only the features were my husband’s, nothing else.  I got rid of a stranger.  The man found dead in the Euston Road was a stranger whom I hated, nothing more to me than that.”

As she spoke, in a deep, resonant voice that pulsated through the room, Dr. Levillier recalled, almost with a thrill, Julian’s words to him in Harley Street, on the night of the fracas with the mastiffs, words spoken about the dead Marr:  “His face dead was the most absolutely direct contradiction possible to his face alive.  He was not the same man.”  He recalled these words and the thought shot through his mind:  “Did the man this woman loved return at the moment of death?”

And that change in Valentine!

He said to Mrs. Wilson, betraying none of the excitement that he really felt: 

“You spoke of cruelty.  You had to endure physical cruelty?”

“Worse, to see it endured by others, dumb, helpless creatures, by my own dog.”

A great shudder ran through her.

“I can’t talk of it,” she said.  “But it made me what I am.  Can you do anything for me?  Why do you look at me like that?”

For, at her word about the dog, the doctor had fallen into a tense reverie, looking steadily upon her, yet as one who sees little or nothing.  He roused himself quickly.

“Tell me something of the symptoms of your mental malady,” he said.  “These fancies that distress you, of what nature are they?”

She told him.  Many of them were symptoms well known to all those who have suffered acutely after some great shock, imagined sounds, movements, and so forth.  The doctor listened.  He had heard such a story many times before.

“I, I am full of these ghastly, these degrading fancies,” Mrs. Wilson cried, with a sort of large indignation against herself, and yet an uncertain terror.  “Is it not—?”

She suddenly stopped speaking.

“There’s some one at your door,” she said, after a second or two of apparent attention to some sound without.

“I dare say.  A patient.”

At this moment a voice, which Dr. Levillier immediately recognized as the voice of Valentine, was audible in the hall.

Mrs. Wilson turned suddenly very pale, and began to tremble and gnaw her nether lip with her teeth in an access of nervous disturbance.

“In God’s name tell me who that is,” she whispered, turning her head in the direction of the door.  “It can’t be—­it can’t be—­” Valentine’s voice rose a little louder.  “It is his voice.”

“Fancy!” the doctor said firmly.  “It is the voice of a friend of mine, Mr. Valentine Cresswell.”