he bay softened the brown of
her skin and, as I observed by watching her closely, served partially
to conceal the nervousness which was wholly unnatural in a girl of such
poise. When she smiled there was a false note in it; it was forced and
it was sufficiently evident to me that she was going through a mental
hell of conflicting emotions that would have killed a woman of less
self-control.

I felt that I would like to be in Fletcher's shoes--doubly so when, at
Kennedy's request, he withdrew, leaving me to witness the torture of a
woman of such fine sensibilities, already hunted remorselessly by her
own thoughts.

Still, I will give Kennedy credit for a tactfulness that I didn't know
the old fellow possessed. He carried through the preliminary questions
very well for a pseudo-doctor, appealing to me as his assistant on
inconsequential things that enabled me to "save my face" perfectly. When
he came to the critical moment of opening the black bag, he made a very
appropriate and easy remark about not having brought any sharp shiny
instruments or nasty black drugs.

"All I wish to do, Miss Bond, is to make a few, simple little tests of
your nervous condition. One of them we specialists call reaction time,
and another is a test of heart action. Neither is of any seriousness at
all, so I beg of you not to become excited, for the chief value consists
in having the patient perfectly quiet and normal. After they are over
I think I'll know whether to prescribe absolute rest or a visit to
Newport."

She smiled languidly, as he adjusted a long, tightly fitting rubber
glove on her shapely forearm and then encased it in a larger, absolutely
inflexible covering of leather. Between the rubber glove and the leather
covering was a liquid communicating by a glass tube with a sort of
dial. Craig had often explained to me how the pressure of the blood was
registered most minutely on the dial, showing the varied emotions as
keenly as if you had taken a peep into the very mind of the subject.
I think the experimental psychologists called the thing a
"plethysmograph."

Then he had an apparatus which measured association time. The essential
part of this instrument was the operation of a very delicate stop-watch,
and this duty was given to me. It was nothing more nor less than
measuring the time that elapsed between his questions to her and her
answers, while he recorded the actual questions and answers and noted
the results which I work