From the tranquillity of her motions and the determination of her few words, she was to be set down as a person, passionless, practical, and without tides of emotion. But her eyes, as she leant gazing out to landwards, changed colour by imperceptible shades, ranging from grey to the slaty-blue colour of the sea itself, and her brows from minute to minute, following the course of her thoughts, curved slightly upwards above eyes that expressed tender reminiscences, and gradually straightened themselves out until, like a delicate bar below her forehead, they denoted, stretched and tensile, the fact that she had arrived at an inflexible determination. In the small and dusky reading-room, that never contained any readers, she set herself slowly to write. “MY DEAR ELLIDA” (her letter ran), “I have again carefully read through your report of what Dr. Tressider says of Kitty’s case, and I see no reason why the dear child should not find it in her to speak within a few weeks--within a month even. Dr. Tressider is certain that there is no functional trouble of the brain or the vocal organs. Then there is just the word for it--obstinacy. The case is not so very uncommon: the position must be regarded psychologically rather than by a pathologist. On the facts given me I should say that your little Kitty is indulging in a sort of dramatic display. You say that she is of an affectionate, even of a jealously affectionate, disposition. Very well, then; I take it that she desires to be fussed over. Children are very inscrutable. Who can tell, then, whether she has not found out (I do not mean to say that she is aware of a motive, as you or I might be)--found out that the way to be fussed over is just not to speak. For you, I should say, it would be almost impossible to cure her, simply because you are the person most worried by her silence. And similarly with the nurses, who say to her: ‘Do say so-and-so, there’s a little pet!’ The desire to be made a fuss of, to occupy the _whole_ mind of some person or of many persons, to cause one’s power to be felt--are these not motives very human? Is there any necessity to go to the length of putting them down to mental aberration?” Katya Lascarides had finished her sheet of paper. She blotted it with deliberate motions, and, leaving it face downwards, she placed her arms upon the table, and, her eyelashes drooping over her distant eyes, she looked reflectively at her long and pointed hands. At last she took up her pen and wrote upon a fresh sheet in her large, firm hand: “I am diagnosing my own case!” Serious and unsmiling she looked at the words; then, as if she were scrawling idly, she wrote: “Robert.” Beneath that: “Robert Hurstlett Grimshaw.” And then: “σας ἀγαπω!”