Her face, neck and arms were deeply suffused as with the flush of high fever. But her manner and movements were not those of a very sick person. Carlson was puzzled.
“I confess I don’t know what to make of your fever,” he said frankly.
She half smiled as she replied:
“Of course. I should have thought of that before. It isn’t a real fever, but what the Italians call an impressione.”
“What’s that?”
“An effect of a shock.”
“But no mere shock can cause actual fever!”
“That’s what many doctors have said. But the fact is that it does with me. I was always that way. There’s something abnormal in my constitution. I can even bring on a fever by willing it. I’m ashamed to say that when I was a child I would sometimes play sick in that way in order to get what I wanted. But I hadn’t done it for so long that I’d almost forgotten about it—until this horrible thing happened, and then I remembered and tried it. But they wouldn’t call a doctor for three days, not until they got badly scared and thought I might die on their hands. And that is why they brought you here.”
“I never heard of such a case before,” said Carlson. “Never! To be sure, there are a few cases on record where the heart and pulse rate were under the control of the will to some extent; but certainly not the temperature.”
He then asked: “How does it happen that the kidnappers have a house like this?”