"She's talking, but I haven't answered her," Gerrond reported. "There's something strange here, Kinnison." "There would be--bound to be. Hold everything until I get there," and he hurried to the hospital. "Good morning, Dessa," he greeted her in Aldebaranian. "You are feeling better, I hope?" Her reaction was surprising. "You really know me?" she almost shrieked, and flung herself into the Lensman's arms. Not deliberately; not with her wonted, highly effective technique of bringing into play the s.a. equipment with which she was so overpoweringly armed. No; this was the utterly innocent, the wholly unselfconscious abandon of a very badly frightened young girl. "What happened?" she sobbed, frantically, "Where am I? Why are all these strangers here?" Her wide, childlike, tear-filled eyes sought his; and as he probed them, deeper and deeper into the brain behind them; his face grew set and hard. Mentally, she now _was_ a young and innocent girl! Nowhere in her mind, not even in the deepest recesses of her subconscious, was there the slightest inkling that she had even existed since her fifteenth year. It was staggering; it was unheard of; but it was indubitably a fact. For her, now, the intervening time had lapsed instantaneously--five or six years of her life had disappeared so utterly as never to have been! "You have been very ill, Dessa," he told her gravely, "and you are no longer a child." He led her into another room and up to a triple mirror. "See for yourself." "But that isn't I?" she protested. "It can't be! Why, she's beautiful!" "You're all of that," the Lensman agreed, casually. "You've had a bad shock. Your memory will return shortly, I think. Now you must go back to bed." She did so, but not to sleep. Instead, she went into a trance; and so, almost, did Kinnison. For over an hour he lay intensely asprawl in an easy-chair, the while he engraved, day by day, a memory of missing years into that bare storehouse of knowledge. And finally the task was done. "Sleep, Dessa," he told her then. "Sleep. Waken in eight hours; whole." "Lensman, you're a _man_!" Gerrond realized vaguely what had been done. "You didn't give her the truth, of course?" "Far from it. Only that she was married and is a widow. The rest of it is highly fictitious--just enough like the real thing so that she can square herself with herself, if she meets old acquaintances. Plenty of lapses, of course, but they're covered by shock." "But the husband?" queried the curious Radeligian. "That's her business," Kinnison countered, callously. "She'll tell you, if she ever feels like it. One thing I did do, though--they'll never use her again. The next man that tries to hypnotize her will be lucky if he gets away alive." * * * * *