“What did she say?” De Medici whispered.
“Mad. You were mad. But I needed no diagnosis from her. Mad you seemed. And very clever, too clever at the inquest. A curious balance of sincerity and evasion. And the two hours between eight o’clock and ten o’clock that night he was killed. Where had you spent them? Yes, a walk in Broadway. But you never walk, my dear Julien. Do I remember correctly? The purse gave me my first definite conviction, however.”
“And now your theory is?” De Medici prompted him quietly.
“The letter has ended it,” Dr. Lytton replied. “Florence Ballau and not Julien De Medici.”
“But I may have written it myself,” De Medici murmured; “written it, sent it from Rollo, Maine ... to myself ... evidence to exonerate me.”
“I thought of that,” smiled Dr. Lytton. “Except that you couldn’t have known I would be here tonight. The letter is authentic. And the rest unravels itself.”
He beamed at the masked eyes of his host.
“Dual personality, as we know it,” he continued, “is a dramatic disease. Yes, the phenomenon of disassociation.... People are seldom born with dual personalities except in the most neurotic of cases. Ordinarily they acquire them. In pathology, dual personality cases belong to the ill-defined border-land between sanity and insanity. It is for that reason that I have been inclined to ridicule your own obsessions, Julien. Dual personalities are not inherited. Bad blood may breed disorders. But the charming Jekyll and Hyde pose you have been trying to wish on yourself is, scientifically, absurd. Are you interested, Julien?”
“Yes.”
The two men sat facing each other out of the shadows of the velvet-hung room. The candles burned motionlessly.