"Please do so," replied Mr. Amidon. "Look at these letters! Do you suppose your Notes would shed any light on what they're driving at?"
The judge looked them over.
"I don't remember anything in the Notes," said he, "regarding these matters. But you could take 'em up to the hotel, and Madame le Claire could put you to sleep and talk it out of you in five minutes."
"I'll do it!" said Amidon. "I'll get Brassfield's views on them, confound him. I'll do this while you're with Edgington. Good-by until after luncheon."
Madame le Claire was examining Mr. Brassfield with reference to the unanswered letters. Professor Blatherwick was engaged in taking down his answers. In a disastrous moment, Mr. Alderson knocked at the door, and, following his knocking, delivered a breathless message to Brassfield that an important telegram demanded instant attention.
"All right," replied Mr. Brassfield cheerily, "I'll toddle right down to the office with you, my boy. Excuse me, Madame; you may rely on my seeking a resumption of this pleasant interview at the earliest possible moment. Au revoir!"
Madame le Claire was perplexed. Should she allow him to go out in this hypnotic state? Could she exercise her art in Alderson's presence? While she debated, Mr. Brassfield airily bowed himself out, and was gone!
Brassfield was gone, that was clear: but no system of Subliminal Engineering had any rule for calculating the results of his escape back into the world from which he had for a fortnight or so been absent. What would he be, and what would he do? Would he return the same hard-headed man of business who had won riches in five short years? Or would he be changed by the return to the normal—his equilibrium made unstable by the tendency to revert to his older self? How would he adjust himself to the things done by Amidon? How would the change affect his relations with Miss Waldron and this bright-haired inamorata so balefully nearing the foreground, like an approaching comet? How would the professor and Judge Blodgett stand with this new factor in the problem? Would he continue to care for her, his rescuer? Owing to some things which had taken place in the Brassfield intervals, her heart fluttered at the thought of a possibly permanent Eugene.
For be it remembered, that many things had taken place in these days of Bellevale life. The situation had, of course, been changing daily by subsurface mutations which the intelligent student of this history will not need to have explained to him. For instance (and herein the explanation of that fluttering of Madame le Claire's heart) such things as these:
Bellevale is not so large a place that neighbors' affairs are not observed of neighbor. Prior to the elaboration of the law of thought-transference, there was no way of accounting for the universality of knowledge of other people's affairs which certain Bellevale circles enjoyed. The good gossiping housewives along the highways leading into the town are often able to tell the exact contents of the packages brought home by their neighbors, under the seats of their buggies and farm-wagons and late at night; but this is a phenomenon not at all unusual. Neither is it in the least strange that, in town or country, John and Sarah could not sit out an evening together in the parlor or settin'-room without all that occurred being talked over, with perfect certainty as to facts, in the next day's meeting of the Missionary Society or the Monday Club. But what Phyllis thought, what were the plans of Thestylis, and how Jane felt when William jilted her, and why William did it—all of which difficult circumstances were canvassed with equal certitude—are things, the knowledge of which, as I said above, was not to be accounted for on any theory at all consistent with respect for the people possessing it, until thought-transference came into fashion. Now all is clear, and our debt to science is increased by another large item.