"I can, for one," agreed the doctor heartily.
"And I, indeed," said Monsieur Dupont. "But to proceed with the story—I think it would be better to commence with what Miss Masters has to tell us."
He bowed to a gray-haired, grief-stricken woman. There was a pause before she overcame her emotion sufficiently to speak.
"I took charge of Mary Winslowe's child from its birth," she began, at last. "She entrusted it to me in her sane moments, and I kept my trust faithfully. Perhaps it would have been better if I had not."
"You did your duty," the doctor said.
"It was a condition that he should never come under his father's influence, or even know his real name. He was to be kept in complete ignorance of the tragedy of his birth. It was necessary for him to be christened in his proper name to legalize the inheritance of his mother's fortune, but after that I took him away, and brought him up in strict accordance with my promises. He was told that both his parents had been drowned at sea. I gave him the name of John Tranter—Tranter was an old family name of mine. He was a bonny little fellow. I never thought that he might have inherited his mother's madness."
"The Laws of Nature are inexorable," said the doctor. "If only the Second Commandment were given to people as the Law of Nature instead of the threat of God, it would be of some value."
"I hardly realized it," she went on, "even when the symptoms had unmistakably developed. But it increased too plainly to be denied. I hoped and prayed that the horrible disease would pass away from him as he grew up—but it grew stronger and stronger with him. At last he made me tell him what it really was. It was against my promise, but he had to know. I pledged my word that I would keep his secret, and it was arranged that whenever he felt the approach of an attack he would come to me. I kept things for him. At first smaller things satisfied him. He was content to destroy flowers, pictures, prettily colored china, anything that was beautiful. But after that visit to France, when he was twenty, there was a change. He never told me what had happened—that he had killed a woman—but from that time only a woman's beauty would satisfy him. The attacks became few and far between, but when they came he would have died with the very force of his madness if he had not had some representation of a beautiful woman to expend it on."
"It's frightful—incredible," the inspector exclaimed.
"It was all the more pitiful," she said, "because his sanity was so wonderful. He had a towering intellect. He succeeded in anything he put his hand to."