in her profession. Afterward she would cry unaccountably. She wanted children. That was natural, I know. But George, in spite of his rare self-control, is a nervous man really. He has not the temperament for children. He had me explain the situation to her, and, I must say, she behaved very reasonably and put it out of her head entirely. And George never for a moment tolerated her returning to the stage, even as an amateur when societies invited her to join with them in their private theatricals. George can be enormously firm. She realized that and made very little difficulty, even though she never wholly understood our point of view. Her people were actors, to be sure. They must often have clouded the issue for her. I'm afraid that she always a little resented George's feeling. She owed me consideration, too. I took every care from her shoulders. Poor child, I had to! She was never in any way fitted to manage George's house. Why, the last time I went abroad she upset things so and moved things so about that George had to cable me to return post-haste. After that she never again tried to interfere. She took up playground work in one of the missions. A good many people were doing it and, though both George and I felt that Ellen should always be very careful, still we saw no harm in it. And there George did allow her to supervise a little theatre of some kind where the children acted in Shakespeare's plays. It filled her days she had absolutely no social gift-and I have been given to understand that some of the performances were quite good."

'And her death," Adams put in, "-sudden as that was, it must have come as a great shock to your brother?"

Miss Minna stiffened. "Of course. A great shock to all of us. Of course to my brother. He loved his wife very dearly. He had made her an ideal husband. No one could deny that."

The nurse came down about that time (I am paraphrasing Adams's account of the case, you understand) to say that Mr. Kinkead was awake and would see the doctor. Miss Minna rose to hope that "Mister-ub-Doctor Adams had learned something which might prove valuable in his treatment of her brother."

Adams had one final point to make. "Such a shock," he suggested, "such a shock as might account for your brother's present serious and puzzling condition?”

"I presume that you refer still to poor Ellen's death?" Miss Minna reflected. "You should be able to answer better than I, doctor. After all, Ellen died nearly a year ago and this strange malady began long after."

"After some months of self-control," Adams observed. "They would add up to quite a total of nervous strain."

Miss Minna stiffened. "A man can be sane," she remarked, "even about the death of his wife. Doctor Clay could find no evidence of abnormal strain before this present business began, and Doctor Clay is not only our regular physician but our intimate friend as well. He admitted that the strangest element in the case was my brother's extraordinary calm. My brother is a very sane man, Doctor Adams."

Adams did not trouble to admit the puzzle. He turned it over in his mind and let it whet his psychiatric appetite. Then, thanking Miss Minna, he thought that he had better see his patient at once.

Accounting for the season of the year, it will have been well on toward dark when Kinkead awoke that day and signified his willingness to be interviewed by his doctor. Adams found him in bed sipping cocoa in lieu of tannic stimulant, wearing a quilted blue smoking-jacket to protect his roundly fattened shoulders from the weather of the city where weather is never quite uninteresting. Adams described the look in his face as that of a cherub, injured; one of Raphael's, perhaps, out of the Sistine, doomed to sell matches on a street corner.

Most men take illness angrily. Some few gain sweetness, kindliness, and humility from illness. Many fall into doldrums of self-pity. Kinkead seemed curiously detached from himself, seemed to look at his case as a dog stares at the unfamiliar without any enlightening mental reaction to tell him what it means. "Small wonder!" Adams commented, reporting to me.

Kinkead omitted greetings and drove straight to his point. "Five times last

in

my life before this started. I can't get up now. The only real sleep I have is in the day."

"We might wonder why nothing happens in the daytime," said Adams. "Let's just be thankful for the respite and let it go at that. We might even turn your office force around," he added, "so that you could work nights and sleep days like a night watchman."

Kinkead, past joking (one surmises that he never made great progress at it), shook his head with mournful seriousness. "I should have nothing to do in the office at night," he explained. "The Stock Exchange wouldn't be open. You couldn't persuade the Stock Exchange to turn it self inside out for one man.

"I suppose not," said Adams.

Adams had thought out an entire new series of questions for the searching of Kinkead's subconsciousness. "There it is," Adams says, speaking of that curiously unexplorable mental wilderness, "like a lock in a river. If you can make it work for you, you go on sailing upstream quite simply. I'm perpetually trying to get up and back into the mind's weir, it seems to me. Only I fail so often and accomplish nothing more than a little springing of the weir gates to let a little more of the mind's backwaters run down into the lock and lift things a bit. You've got to get the gates open. Those forgotten waters, if you leave them to their own natural leakage, make so much trouble. If only we psychiatrists could once and for all get them under control so that we could open the lock gates wide every so often for every mind."

He had determined to pry loose some sort of boyhood association with the dark which would explain this amazing behavior of the mature Kinkead. He was trying to make Kinkead admit that once, even once, his child's sleep had been terrified to wakefulness. . .

"Kinkead doesn't hold a thing back from me," he complained afterward. "I'm confident of that. And yet I can get nowhere with him. He's so perfectly frank and so perfectly stupid. I don't believe that anything has ever really upset him. I don't believe that anything could. I don't believe that the man's

mind has any of that subconscious weir water or hinterland, if you like another metaphor, upon which you and I draw for our temperaments and our inspirations. As for his conscience, I have never met an easier."

Only at the end of the hour did Adams, by the merest chance, come back again upon the topic of the dead wife. He saw her last photograph, recklessly encased in silver, youth and glory faded into a portly image of Indian summer.

"Mrs. Kinkead, I suppose?" he remarked.

"My poor Ellen," said Kinkead. "She would have been a great comfort to me now. She read aloud so beautifully and her reading would have made me sleep." "She was a great actress in her day," Adams observed.

"Ah," said Kinkead. "She soon got over that. She was a sweet and loving wife. That's something more, isn't it, doctor?"

"Something else, at any rate," Adams replied.

Adams dined with the brother and sister, and enjoyed his dinner, too, and played chess afterward with the brother while the sister read the Transcript aloud to herself without making any sound about it. At ten, on Adams's order, Kinkead went to bed.

At ten-thirty Adams bade Miss Minna good-night, assured her that he had everything he needed and went to his room. At a quarter to eleven the nurse called him. He made certain that Miss Minna's retirement was well under way. . . "a prayer for brother George and one for poor Ellen, too, I dare say". . . and took up his watch.

...

"It began at eleven-thirty," he told me, and I shall transcribe his own account with absolute fidelity. "It was a horrid business altogether. He was asleep on his right side, sound asleep and breathing deeply and quickly like a dog. The breathing came, of course, from my sleeping prescription. I saw him sit up quite as suddenly as though some one had called him, and he brought his hands together with a report that fairly frightened me. It all happened exactly as he had described it. He clapped, if you can imagine such a

thing, like one of those French clown dolls with a cymbal at the end of each wooden arm, and his hands were limp as a duck's feet. Try it, with your hands flapping and your wrists limp that way and eyes wide open.

"And right there was something the nurse hadn't told me about. Nurses are so accurate on temperature charts and that sort of thing and so blind really. Eyes wide open, mind you, and simply enthralled. All kinds of sight in them, too, if you know what I mean. But, above all, an expression of the most magical, the most ecstatic delight. That was the strangest of it. I wasn't prepared for that. Kinkead couldn't have known about it, because-well, because he couldn't possibly have lied about anything so vitally real as that self-evident, irrepressible delight. He looked a bond-selling, cherubic fool suddenly vouchsafed a glimpse of paradise. . . .

"Shan't I waken him?' The nurse wakened me. 'He's kept it up for three minutes now. It's the veronal, of course, but, even so, it tires him dreadfully if it isn't stopped.'

"That roused me, for I give you my word I'd never seen anything like it, and I was considerably dashed. I turned on the light and it made no difference. We had to hold his arms. He's a powerful chap and it took some effort. That was odd, too, because I noticed that his shoulder muscles didn't seem to be much exerted. I had half the feeling that I was struggling with some one else for the mastery of his wrists.”

"That is odd." I admitted.

"I thought so," Adams continued, "and, what's more, the feeling didn't leave me until we had awakened him and stopped the whole ghastly show. And we had to slap him to waken him. Without that we could make no impression on him." "What then?" I asked. "Oh," said Adams, "he cried, of course. They mostly do."

"Was that all?"

“All?” Adams laughed. "You would have thought it quite enough had you seen it."

"He went off to sleep again afterwards," I supposed.

"Yes," said Adams. "The veronal

took him off in no time. But at twelveforty-five we had exactly the same entertainment again. A third performance began at two minutes past three, a fourth at four-ten and a fifth at five. The fifth had hardly started before he wakened himself. The veronal was wearing off.",

"Five times!" I cried.

"Do you wonder," Adams said gravely, "that the man's a wreck?”

I hazarded a solution for myself. "Have you ever read Bulwer's 'The House and the Brain'?" I asked.

Adams is hardly the man for Victorian fiction. "But it's a possibility with which you ought to reckon," I insisted, after I had outlined Bulwer's melodrama masterpiece. "Some modern Mesmer performing a wicked experiment on your broker, who seems the perfectly unresisting type . . . performing a wicked experiment or taking a wicked revenge."

Adams wasn't much impressed with Bulwer's respect for mesmerism. Adams said: "I had almost rather believe something else altogether, something entirely outside my province, something quite simple, too, if you don't mind what you believe."

"What will that be?" I pressed him. "I told you about the look on his face," Adams answered slowly, "the really exquisite and breathless delight of his expression during the spell or seizure, or whatever you choose to call it. Well, after the third crisis, when I could be quite certain of my own nerves, I asked the nurse if she had noticed anything else. Something quite separate from any of us three in the room.

"Had she noticed anything?"

"No, and she explained my reaction to her own satisfaction but not at all to mine. I'm just a bit too seasoned for some things. And after the last riot at five in the morning, I was pretty nearly sure."

The click came in my mind which tells me always when Adams and I are thinking the same thought. I snapped up the point. "Then the cause is outside," I cried. "Not to be looked for in him at all-not even in his subconsciousness."

Adams demurred. "I won't let you turn this case into a ghost-story," he said, "even though I am trying to tell you that there was a sense of something in the