"I don't credit them myself," replied the doctor shortly. "Personally I wish these phenomena didn't exist. They complicate the equation of life tremendously. But they are there. It is no use dismissing them as hysterical manifestations. That only alters the title of the problem, and we have to refer to the phenomena again under the heading 'What is hysteria?'" "Of one thing I am certain," remarked Ned suddenly, with conviction: "it was not Helen altogether, as she is now, whom I left in Betty Cam's chair last night. I have been going over the whole incident in my mind, and I am conscious of having had a sense all through that there was something unkenned, something not quite real----" "The question is," put in Dr. Ramsay, "how much she will remember when she wakes, and that cannot be very long now, for she was much more normal when I went in to see her last, two hours ago. I shall look in again as I go upstairs." "I hope she will remember nothing," said Ned quickly. Peter Ramsay shook his head. "It may be everything; you cannot possibly tell----" he broke off as a knock was heard at the door, and a voice said, "May I come in?" "My God!" he continued, "there she is!" It was indeed Helen who, entering as he held open the door, passed swiftly to her cousin's side. "Poor Ned!" she said, her face, on which showed the marks of recent tears, full of a grateful, affectionate solicitude. "How foolish it has been of me to leave you to bear the brunt of it all; but I am all right now, and shall manage. He ought to be in bed, oughtn't he?" she continued, her eyes narrowing a little as they met Peter Ramsay's, her whole expression showing for an instant a half-puzzled pain, as if she sought for some memory of past trouble. "I am sure you think so--don't you?" "I think so very much indeed, Mrs. Tressilian," he replied. "Your cousin's arm----" "Poor arm!" she interrupted softly, "that was broken before I came down--I was asleep, I suppose, when they called me--it seems so strange that I could have slept, and I seem to have forgotten everything except the awful suspense; then the awful night on the point--but--but you couldn't have saved him, Ned. It was the stairs--if only they had been fireproof!--for he knew every turn. I--I have been down to see him, Ned, and he looks so peaceful--so content. You see he had done all he could--all a Pentreath should have done--so--so it is best. And now, dear, you really must go to bed. I can manage nicely. I will send to meet the Massinghams--poor souls!--how terribly sad, and how inexplicable it all is!" Inexplicable indeed! They looked at each other silently. She evidently knew all that they knew, but of what they did not know she also knew nothing. The interval between the time when she had passed upstairs to her room, joking and laughing with the others, and her first sight of the halo of fire had simply lapsed into a great suspense.