Mrs. Wilson said nothing.  She was trying to force herself to believe the evidence of another’s sense against her own.  Such a task is always difficult.  At last she looked up and said: 

“There, doctor, there you have an exhibition of my illness.  It’s horrible to me.  Can you cure it?”

“I will try,” the doctor answered.

But he found it very difficult just at that moment to say the three words quietly, to let Valentine go after leaving his message, without confronting him with this haggard patient who was entering the pool of Bethesda.

CHAPTER IX

A SHADOW ON FIRE

When a naturally calm, clear, and courageous mind finds itself besieged by what seem hysterical fancies, it is troubled and perplexed, and is inclined to take drastic measures to restore itself to its normal condition.  Dr. Levillier found himself the prey of such fancies after his interview with Mrs. Wilson.  He had prescribed for her.  He had very carefully considered what way of life would be likely to restore her to health, and to banish the demons which had brought her strength and unusual self-reliance so low.  He had received her gratitude, and had dismissed her to the following of his plans for her benefit.  All this he had done with calm deliberation, the very cheerful composure which he always practiced towards the victims of nervous complaints.  But even while he did this his own mind was in a turmoil.  For this woman had let fall statements with regard to her dead husband which most curiously bolstered up Cuckoo’s fantastic assertion that Valentine and Marr were the same man.  Marr had been cruel to animals, to dogs, had evidently taken a keen enjoyment in torturing them, and on hearing Valentine’s voice she had turned pale and declared that it was the voice of her husband.  Then her strange declaration about her husband’s use of music as a mode of cruelty!  These circumstances appealed powerfully to the doctor’s mind, or at least to that unscientific side of it which inclined him to romance, and to a certain sympathy with the mysteries of the world.  Many Europeans who go to India return to their own continent imbued with a belief in miracles, modern miracles, which no argument, no sarcasm, can shake.  But there are miracles in Europe too.  The magicians of the East work wonders in the strange atmosphere of that strange country, whose very air is heavy with magic.  Yet England, too, has her magicians.  London holds in the arms of its yellow fogs and dust-laden clouds miracles.  Doctor Levillier found himself assailed by ideas like these as he thought of that transformed Marr, “possessed,” as the pale, strongly built wreck of a grand, powerful woman had named it, as he thought of the transformed Valentine, the hour of whose transformation coincided with the hour of Marr’s death.  Why had this new, horrible, yet beautiful creature risen out of the ashes of the trance that was practically a death?