Facing the elderly lady in the hall, she addressed her with the force and soberness of one leading a forlorn hope:
“I want you to concentrate your mind upon what I have to say to you. Do you think you can do this?”
“I will try,” replied the poor woman with a backward glance at the door which had just been closed upon her.
“What we want,” said she, “is, as I stated before, an insight into the workings of your brain at the time you took the will from the safe. Try and follow what I have to say, Mrs. Quintard. Dreams are no longer regarded by scientists as prophecies of the future or even as spontaneous and irrelevant conditions of thought, but as reflections of a near past, which can almost without exception be traced back to the occurrences which caused them. Your action with the will had its birth in some previous line of thought afterwards forgotten. Let us try and find that thought. Recall, if you can, just what you did or read yesterday.”
Mrs. Quintard looked frightened.
“But, I have no memory,” she objected. “I forget quickly, so quickly that in order to fulfill my engagements I have to keep a memorandum of every day’s events. Yesterday? yesterday? What did I do yesterday? I went downtown for one thing, but I hardly know where.”
“Perhaps your memorandum of yesterday’s doings will help you.”
“I will get it. But it won’t give you the least help. I keep it only for my own eye, and—”
“Never mind; let me see it.”
And she waited impatiently for it to be put in her hands.