“You wrote it yourself,” he said quietly. “Don’t you recognize your paper and your writing? It’s a little strange, but sleep-writing always is.”
“Then I am a somnambulist!” she exclaimed, with flushing cheek.
“There is nothing dreadful in that,” he replied. “You have promised to trust me about your health. I know all about it, and if you write yourself forty notes, you are not to bother.”
She sighed, and then bravely smiled.
“I’ll try not to worry,” she told him; “but I am a coward not to send you away. I wonder why I should have chosen Jenny as the name of your beloved.”
“I’m sure I don’t know; it’s an ugly name enough,” he responded, with a quick thought that he hoped Jenny could hear. “At any rate, I tell you with my whole heart that you are the only woman in the world for me.”
He did not see Jenny again until the evening before his marriage. He fancied she was avoiding him, especially as once Alice sent down word that she was too busy to see him. He received, however, a note on Wednesday. The hand, so like that of Alice and yet so unmistakably different, affected him most unpleasantly, nor was he made more at ease by the contents.
“You think you got ahead of me by telling Alice she was a sleep-walker, did n’t you! Well, I don’t care, for I’m going to get rid of her for always when we are married. I did n’t mean to be married in that nasty old gray dress, and I won’t be, either. You see if I am. You are very unkind to me. You might remember that I’m a great deal fonder of you than she is, because I’ve got real feeling and she’s a kind of graven image. You’ll love your little wifie Jenny very dearly.”
Dr. Carroll began to feel as if his own brain were whirling. He could not reply to the note, since he could hardly address a letter to Jenny somewhere inside the personality of Alice. He realized that a strain such as this would soon so tell on him that he would be unfit to care for Alice, and he made up his mind that the time had come for the strongest measures. To tell what the strongest measures were, however, was a problem which occupied him for the rest of the day, and about which he consulted the specialist. Even when, that evening, he walked down West Cedar Street, he could hardly be sure that he would carry out his plan. He was told at the door by Abby that Miss Alice had given strict orders against his being admitted.
“When did she do that?” he inquired.