Temporarily I was floored.  How could she, so ignorant of other matters, feel so sure of this?  There was no explaining it.

We went back into the house.  As it happened, my eye struck first the gramophone.  And it seemed a good idea to test her knowledge with this.

“Is this apparatus familiar to you?”

“No.  What is it for?”

“Do you understand what is meant by the term ’music’?”

“Yes,” with instant pleasure.  “This is music.”  She proceeded, without the slightest self-consciousness, to sing in a sweet clear soprano, and treated us to the chorus of “I Am Climbing Mountains!”

“Good heavens!” gasped Charlotte.  “What can it mean?”

For a moment the explanation evaded me.  Then I reasoned:  “She must have a sub-conscious memory of what was being played just before she materialised.”

And to prove this I picked out an instrumental piece which we had not played all the evening.  It was the finale of the overture to “Faust”; a selection, by the way, which was a great favourite of Harry’s and is one of mine.  Ariadne listened in silence to the end.

“I seem to have heard something like it before,” she decided slowly.  “The melody, not the—­the instrumentation.  But it reminds me of something that I like very much.”  Whereupon she began to sing for us.  But this time her voice was stronger and more dramatic; and as for the composition—­all I can say is it had a wild, fierce ring to it, like “Men of Harlech”; only the notes did not correspond to the chromatic scale.  She Sang in an entirely new musical system.

“By George!” when she had done.  “Now we have got something!  For the first time, we’ve heard some genuine, unadulterated Blind Spot stuff!”

“You mean,” from Charlotte, excitedly, “that she has finally recovered her memory?”

It was the girl herself who answered.  She shot to her feet, and her face became transfigured with a wonderful joy.  At the same time she blinked hurriedly, as though to shut off a sight that staggered her.

“Oh, I remember!  I”—­she almost sobbed in her delight—­“it is all plain to me, now!  I know who I am!”

XXIII

THE RHAMDA AGAIN

I could have yelled for joy.  We were about to learn something of the Blind Spot—­something that might help us to save Harry, and Chick, and the professor!

Ariadne seemed to know that a great deal depended upon what she was about to tell us.  She deliberately sat down, and rested her chin upon her hand, as though determining upon the best way of telling something very difficult to express.

As for Charlotte, Jerry, and myself, we managed somehow to restrain our curiosity enough to keep silence.  But we could not help glancing more or less wonderingly at our visitor.  Presently I realised this, and got up and walked quietly about, as though intent upon a problem of my own.