may have seen her, an exceedingly pretty
girl lately come from Wales or somewhere--and on her face was
reflected and mimicked, in the most astonishing way, the horrible
expression on the face of the corpse, while the fingers of her right
hand were so closely locked around the cross--'

I felt that from my mouth there issued a voice not mine--a long
smothered shriek like that which had seemed to issue from my mouth on
that awful night when, looking out of the window, I had heard the
noise of the landslip. Then I felt myself whispering 'The Curse!'
Then I knew no more.

XIII

I had another dangerous relapse, and was delirious for two days, I
think. When I came to myself, the first words I uttered to Mivart,
whom I found with me, were inquiries about Winifred. He was loth at
first to revive the subject, though he supposed that the effect of
his narrative upon me had arisen partly from my weakness and partly
from what he called his 'sensational way' of telling the story. (My
mother had been very careful to drop no hint of the true state of the
case.) At last, however, Mivart told me all he knew about Winifred,
while I hid my face in my pillow and listened.

'In the seizures (which are recurrent) the girl,' he said, 'mimics
the expression of terror on her father's face. Between the paroxysms
she lapses into a strange kind of dementia. It is as though her own
mind had fled and the body had been entered by the soul of a child.
She will then sing snatches of songs, sometimes in Welsh and
sometimes in English, but with the strange, weird intonation of a
person in a dream. I have known something like this to take place
before, but it has been in seizures of an epileptic kind, very unlike
this case in their general characteristics. The mental processes seem
to have been completely arrested by the shock, as the wheels of a
watch or a musical box are stopped if it falls.'

He could tell me nothing about her, he said, nor what had become of
her since she had left his hands.

'The parish officer is taking his holiday,' he added. 'I mean to
inquire about her. I wish I could take her to Paris to the
Salpetriere, where Marini is treating such cases by transmitting
through magnetism the patient's seizure to a healthy subject.'

'Will she recover?'

'Without the Salpetriere treatment?'

'Will she recover?' I asked, maddened beyond endurance by all this
cold-blooded professional enthusiasm about a case which was simply a
cas