too. It is more like a monomania than anything
we have had yet. It is like a fixed idea in character; she certainly is
not sane enough to have meant it ironically,--to have meant that Paul
Patoff is not a son to her while thinking only of the other one who is
dead. Did she speak Russian fluently? She has not spoken it for more
than eighteen months,--perhaps longer."

"She speaks it perfectly," I replied.

"What strange tricks this brain of ours will play us!" exclaimed the
professor. "Here is a woman who has forgotten every circumstance of her
former life, has forgotten her friends and relations, and is puzzling us
all with her extraordinary lack of memory, and who, nevertheless,
remembers fluently the forms and expressions of one of the most
complicated languages in the world. At the same time we do not think
that she remembers what she reads. I wish we could find out. She acts
like a person who has had an injury to some part of the head which has
not affected the rest. But then, she never received any injury, to my
knowledge."

"Not even when she fell at Weissenstein?"

"Not the least. I made a careful examination."

"I do not see that we are likely to arrive at a conclusion by any amount
of guessing," I remarked. "Nothing but time and experiments will show
what is the matter with her."

"I have not the time, and I cannot invent the experiments," replied the
professor, impatiently. "I have a great mind to advise Carvel to put her
into an asylum, and have done with all this sort of thing."

"He will never consent to do that," I answered. "He evidently believes
that she is recovering. I could see it in his face this evening. What do
the nurses think of it?"

"Mrs. North never says anything very encouraging, excepting that she has
taken care of many insane women before, and remembers no case like this.
She is a famous nurse, too. Those people, from their constant daily
experience, sometimes understand things that we specialists do not. But
on the other hand, she is so taciturn and cautious that she can hardly
be induced to speak at all. The other woman is younger and more
enthusiastic, but she has not half so much sense."

I was silent. I was thinking that, according to all accounts, I had been
more successful than any one hitherto, and that a possible clue to
Madame Patoff's condition might be obtained by encouraging her to speak
in her adopted language. Perhaps something of the sort crossed the
professor's