She first satisfied herself that by no chance could this man be Manning, and then turned her thoughts back to her all-engrossing theme.
“I am sorry for him,” she said, as I described his cheerful disposition and rather winning personality, “and if I can do anything to help him, I will do it. Does he want a position of some sort when he gets well enough to take one?”
“I suppose he will,” I returned; “he’s an alive sort of chap, and of course he’ll earn his living one way or another.”
“And he may soon recover his memory,” began Mrs. Vail. “I knew a man once who had amnesia and aphasia both, and it was six months before he got over it. But when his memory came back, it came all at once, like a flash, and then he was all right.”
“In this case,” I said, “the doctors want to find someone who knows the man. It ought not to be difficult to find his friends, or someone who can identify him. Why, that peculiar voice ought to do it.”
“Imitate it,” directed Mrs. Vail, and to the best of my ability I talked in the monotonous tones of the amnesic victim.
Olive laughed. “I never heard anybody talk like that,” she said. “It’s absolutely uninflected.”
“Yes, that’s just what it was. He had no inflections or shadings in his tones.”
“A voice is so individual,” pursued Olive. “Amory Manning’s voice is full and musical; I’ve often told him he conveys as much meaning by his tones as by his words.”
“I knew a man once,” put in Mrs. Vail, “who could recite the alphabet so dramatically that he made his audience laugh or cry or shudder, just by his tones.”