Her face, in the moonlight, looked drawn—I should scarcely have recognised her, nor indeed should I have recognised her sweet, dear voice.
Oh! what was it she said, in those hard, shrill tones? I was so unnerved, I can hardly recall those terrible words.
But she spoke with reproach.
“Where is the water here?” she asked. “There were fish—gold fish, silver fish—where are they? Where are the flowers? There were roses, red roses there,” and, pointing to a bed where Sir Roderick by careful expenditure had cultivated some hardy rose trees, she fell prone at my feet.
I had my token—she knew the place as it was of old, before she had awakened in this world.
Perhaps the greatest mystery among these many mysteries is this—I can write it all down, just as it happened, calmly, coolly, as I should record an exceptional case in medicine.
I took her in my arms and carried her back through the wood into the flower garden of the house. She was a dead weight, but I was impervious to ordinary impressions. Then I laid her upon a wide wooden bench in the Italian garden, and by slow degrees she recovered. Before the clock struck ten, she was able to join them all in the drawing-room.
I have a great power over her. I found that when I had sufficiently rallied from my emotions to exercise my will, that willing her to be her ordinary self (while her hands were in mine and my eyes fixed upon her face) “brought her to,” as the nurses say, at once.
This had opened up another aspect of affairs. If I have this power over her, may not that possibly be the cause of her liking for me—even of her impressions of her dreams? I must investigate, search, leave no stone unturned to unearth the truth. Too much is at stake.
Next day, I willed her to be cheerful and happy, and she was so. (Another symptom, which I duly recorded.)