"I don't know her. I never saw her in my life."
"Then why—"
"That part can wait. I'll explain later. You were saying that as soon as you talked with me over the telephone you did something. What was it?"
"Oh, yes, I called up Doctor Steele, chief surgeon in the psychopathic ward, who happens to be a friend of mine and one of us besides"—he tapped the badge he wore under his coat lapel—"and told him I was bringing you down to see this woman, and he volunteered some information of the case in advance of your coming. I've forgotten just what he called the form of insanity which has seized her—it's a jaw-breaking Latin name—but anyhow, he said his preliminary diagnosis convinced him that it must have been coming on her for some time; that it was marked by delusions of persecution and by an exaggerated ego, causing its victims to imagine themselves the objects of plots engineered by the most distinguished personages, such as rulers and high dignitaries; and that while in this state a man or a woman suffering from this particular brand of lunacy was apt to shift his or her suspicion from one person to another—first perhaps accusing some perfectly harmless and well-meaning individual, who might be a relative or a near friend, and then nearly always progressing to the point in his or her madness where the charge was directed against some famous character."
"Did you hear anywhere any mention made of a daughter—the red-haired child of twelve years ago?" inquired Miss Smith.
"To be sure I did, but I'd forgotten about her," said Mullinix. "Mrs. Sheehan told me that somewhere in her excited narrative Mrs. Vinsolving did say something about the daughter. As nearly as I can recall, she told Mrs. Sheehan that five or six weeks ago, or some such matter, her daughter had tried to kill her and that she thought then the daughter had gone mad, but that now she knew the girl had joined the Kaiser's gang for pay. I made a mental note of this part of the rigmarole at the time Mrs. Sheehan was repeating it to me, and then it slipped my mind. But now putting that yarn alongside of what Doctor Steele tells me about the symptoms of the disease, I see the connection—first the daughter, then the strange servant girl and finally the Kaiser. But say, I wonder why the daughter hasn't been keeping some sort of a guard over the poor demented creature? What can she have been thinking about herself to let her mother go running foot-loose round the country, nursing these changing delusions?"
"She couldn't very well help herself," put in Miss Smith. "The daughter is in an asylum—put there five weeks ago on the mother's complaint."
"But heavens alive, how could that have happened?"
"Very easily—under the laws of this state," she answered grimly. Then speaking more quickly: "I've changed my mind about going to Bellevue with you. Please tell the driver to take me to the Grand Central Station. I don't know what train I'm going to catch, except that it's the next one leaving on the Hudson River Division for up state. You go on then, please, to the hospital and find out all you can about this case and call me on the long-distance to-night—no, that won't do either. I don't know where I'll be. I may be in Peekskill or in Albany—I can't say which. I tell you—I'll call you at eight o'clock; that will be better.
"No, no!" she went on impetuously, reading on his face the protest he meant to utter. "My wrist is well bandaged and giving me no pain. I'm thinking now of what a poor brave girl had on both her wrists when last I saw her and of what she must have been enduring since then. I'll explain the biggest chapter of the story to you on the way over before you drop me at the station."