“You know him!” she cried, half guessing at the truth.

“I know him—­and I love him,” said Unorna slowly and fiercely, her eyes fixed on her enemy, and gradually leaning towards her so as to bring her face nearer and nearer to Beatrice.

The dark woman tried to rise, and could not.  There was worse than anger, or hatred, or the intent to kill, in those dreadful eyes.  There was a fascination from which no living thing could escape.  She tried to scream, to shut out the vision, to raise her hand as a screen before it.  Nearer and nearer it came, and she could feel the warm breath of it upon her cheek.  Then her brain reeled, her limbs relaxed, and her head fell back against the wall.

“I know him, and I love him,” were the last words Beatrice heard.

CHAPTER XX[*]

[*] The deeds here recounted are not imaginary.  Not very long ago the sacrilege which Unorna attempted was actually committed at night in a Catholic church in London, under circumstances that clearly proved the intention of some person or persons to defile the consecrated wafers.  A case of hypnotic suggestion to the committal of a crime in a convent occurred in Hungary not many years since, with a different object, namely, a daring robbery, but precisely as here described.  A complete account of the case will be found, with authority and evidence, in a pamphlet entitled Eine experimentale Studie auf dem Gebiete des Hypnotismus, by Dr. R. von Krafft-Ebing, Professor of Psychiatry and for nervous diseases, in the University of Gratz.  Second Edition, Stuttgart, Ferdinand Enke, 1889.  It is not possible, in a work of fiction, to quote learned authorities at every chapter, but it may be said here, and once for all, that all the most important situations have been taken from cases which have come under medical observation within the last few years.

Unorna was hardly conscious of what she had done.  She had not had the intention of making Beatrice sleep, for she had no distinct intention whatever at that moment.  Her words and her look had been but the natural results of overstrained passion, and she repeated what she had said again and again, and gazed long and fiercely into Beatrice’s face before she realised that she had unintentionally thrown her rival and enemy into the intermediate state.  It is rarely that the first stage of hypnotism produces the same consequences in two different individuals.  In Beatrice it took the form of total unconsciousness, as though she had merely fainted away.