“He wanted two things. One was to make sure that you really were here on Wednesday night. He is now quite satisfied of that. The other is to ask you if you can explain something that has puzzled us in Weathered’s appointment-book. Whenever your name appears it is followed by a number, and we don’t know why.” Violet lowered her eyes with a frown. “He gave me that number to sign my letters by when I wrote to him. He told me that it would help me to write more freely if I used a number instead of a name.” I started in alarm. “But why should you need that? What were the letters about?” The poor girl’s eyes still refused to meet mine. “He made me tell him the whole story in letters. He said that was the only way to get it off my mind.” I clenched my teeth together to keep myself from uttering a word. The doctor’s safe had been opened and his case-book destroyed uselessly. CHAPTER XII PSYCHO-ANALYSIS It was one of those moments in which life seems to cast away the mask of convention and spring upon us like a giant fanged and armed for our destruction; one of those moments in which the bravest heart quails and the strongest hope withers to despair. My crime had been committed for nothing. Whether the death of that despicable villain lay at my door or not, I did not know, and it hardly seemed to matter any longer. Somewhere there was still in existence the weapon with which he had terrorized his unhappy victim, and I could not tell in what hands, nor when it might be employed to ruin her and me together. Weathered’s cunning scheme stood revealed in its full atrocity. His patients had been divided into two classes. Those who had nothing serious on their consciences, and those whom it was not worth his while to blackmail received the ordinary treatment given to nervous patients by respectable physicians. Those who came to him to be cured of vicious propensities, on the other hand, were encouraged to indulge them under his eye, under the pretence that they would thus be gradually overcome; and those who sought relief from evil memories were bidden to rid their mind of its secret burden in correspondence which could be preserved for future use.