“I have not had such a night's sleep for I know not how long,” she answered. “Heaven knows I had enough to think about to keep me awake, yet I must have lain in total unconsciousness for fully nine hours. What was most grateful, I did not dream. All which leads me to suspect that, despite your protestations to the contrary, the medicine you made me drink last evening contained an opiate.”
“The medicine I prevailed upon you to drink last evening,” I explained, “was the mildest composing-draught known to the Pharmacopoeia—a most harmless mixture of orange-flower water, bromide, and sugar. If it had the effect of a sleeping-potion, I am very glad to learn it, for it indicates the degree of your nervous susceptibility—a point upon which it is highly desirable that I should be informed. And are you still of the same mind in which I left you? You have not reconsidered your determination?”
“No. I am still ready to be killed or regenerated—I am really quite indifferent which. When I awoke this morning, I could not help fancying that the conversation which I seemed to recall had never really taken place—that I had dreamed it. But this lady, your sister, assures me that my doubt is groundless. Now I can only request you to begin and get over with it as soon as possible.”
“My beginning must be in the nature of an interrogatory. I must ask you for certain information.”
“Very well. Ask.”
“My questions shall be few: only those formal ones which, as a physician, I should put to any patient whom I was about to treat. First, then, what is your name?”
“My name is Louise Massarte, spelt M-a-s-s-a-r-t-e.”
I opened my case-book, prepared my fountain-pen for action, and wrote “Louise Massarte.”
“It is a foreign name, is it not?” I inquired “Were you born in this country?”
“Like the other hopeful subject of whom you told me last night, I was born in France—at the city of Tours.”