It seemed to her that a slight convulsion passed over the sleeper's face.
Tims seated herself on a low chair, in the attitude of certain gargoyles that crouch under the eaves of old churches, elbows on knees, chin on hands, and fixed her eyes in silence on her silent companion. In spite of her work along the acknowledged lines of science, she had pursued her hypnotic studies furtively, half in scorn and half in fear of her scientific brethren. What would she not have given to be enabled to watch, to comprehend the changes passing within that human form so close to her that she could see its every external detail, could touch it by the out-stretching of a hand! But its inner shrine, its secret place, remained barred against those feeble implements of sense with which nature has provided the explorative human intelligence. Its content was more mysterious, more inaccessible than that of the remotest star which yields the secret of its substance to the spectroscope of the astronomer.
Tims's thoughts had forsaken the personal side of the question, when she was recalled to it by seeing the right hand in which the stylograph had been lying begin to twitch, the fingers to contract. There was no answering movement in the face—even when the sleeper at length firmly grasped the pen and suddenly sat up. Tims rose quickly, and then perceived, lying on the writing-board, a directed envelope and a half-finished note to herself. She slipped the note-paper nearer to the twitching hand, and after a few meaningless flourishes, it wrote slowly and tentatively:
"Tims—Milly—cannot get back. Help me ... Save Ian. Wicked creature—no conscience—"
Here the power of the hand began to fail, and the writing was terminated by mere scrawls. The sleeper's eyes were now open, but not wide. They had a strange, glassy look in them, nor did she show any consciousness of Tims's presence. She dropped the pen, folded the paper in the same slow and tentative manner in which she had written upon it, and placed it in the directed envelope lying there. Then her face contracted, her fingers slackened, and she fell back again to the depths of the chair.
"Milly!" cried Tims, almost involuntarily bending over her. "Milly!"
Again there was a slight contraction of the face and of the whole body.
At the moment that Tims uttered Milly's name, Ian was entering the room. His long legs brought him up to the chair in an instant, and he asked, without the usual salutation:
"What's the matter? Has—has the change happened?"