"Learn. Your natural mastery over her renders you the one above all others to treat her successfully. Let her stare at the knife again--or any bright object. Lead back into her past, and try to find what was on her mind when she first walked in her sleep; then tell her that her fears or anxiety were groundless, and that she must never get up in her sleep again." He gave Beverton as much of practical instruction as was safe for a novice to possess, and with some misgivings the half-credulous young husband resolved to experiment alone. But in his first attempt to do so, he found unexpected developments in the situation that seemed to remove the solution farther yet from his powers. Not daring to take her into his confidence, he waited, evening after evening, for her to place herself under favoring conditions--to take up the wearying tale of the sea, and to rest her eyes and brain by staring at the glistening array of steel on the wall. She capriciously and vivaciously declared that she would have nothing more to do with either, that she would divert her mind by polishing up her neglected accomplishment of stenography (from practice of which he had rescued her by marriage), and while he fidgeted and made occasional more or less adroit references to the story, which he pretended to admire, she translated into hieroglyphics the random thoughts of her brain. "For if I make a widow of myself some night," she said, "and an angel of you, Tommie, and escape execution, I will need to earn my living, don't you see? But if you like that horrid story, suppose you read to me from where I left off, and I'll take it down for practice." He had committed himself, and was bound to the task. He began at the top of the page and read, but she mercifully stopped him part way to the bottom, so that she might transcribe her notes and verify. This measured her interest in the story, and as he had none himself he gladly ceased, and she began her transcription. While waiting for her he glanced at the ornament on the wall. It was bright, pleasing to the eye--artistic in finish and design. It attracted his gaze, and having secured it, held it; for the longer he looked the less inclined he felt to look elsewhere, and at last, with the knife filling his vision to the exclusion of the fork and steel, his eyelids drooped and his senses left him. When he wakened he was on his knees, with hands clasped in supplication before his wife, who, with tears in her eyes, but with laughter quivering on her lips--in fact, nearly hysterical, had arisen from her chair with her pencil and notebook. "Why, Tom," she said, "what is the matter with you? You were not yourself; it was so absurd and ridiculous. Did you go to sleep, and do you talk in your sleep, as I walk in mine?" "No," he answered, rising and blinking sheepishly. "Did I? Yes, perhaps I did doze off--in the chair. Did I get up?"