“After the inquest I began to see what was worrying you, poor Julien. I couldn’t understand at first, but from the way you spoke and acted I saw that you didn’t believe it was I who had done it and that somehow you accused yourself. Oh, it was terrible! I didn’t know what you might do, and yet I figured blindly that if I kept still, your self-suspicions would lead you off the track. Then I took mother to Rollo. We had been there once before during a summer. There’s a sanitarium on the outskirts of the village. They knew her there and the thing she was suffering from. And I entrusted her to their keeping and hurried back to New York. I remembered that during several of her seizures she had written letters to father and signed them ‘Floria.’ They were letters threatening to kill him and addressing him sometimes by name and sometimes as Baron Scarpia. Some of them had the picture of a dagger underneath the name Floria. I meant to destroy them and I recalled that it was one thing I had forgotten to do. So I came back and they caught me. “I had tried right along to make out I was convinced father had committed suicide, and I was hoping the police would believe it. And from the way they acted at the inquest I felt almost desperately certain that they did. I knew you had learned about the telephone call, but I was positive you would say nothing. Oh, you were so good, Julien! But when they arrested me and began their questioning I saw that they hadn’t been fooled. I didn’t know what course to take, so I decided to say nothing. I didn’t care what happened to me. I think I must have gone a little mad myself. And that night they brought you and that terrible doctor to the station I was completely insane. Crazed ideas kept coming into my head. I couldn’t figure out how much you knew, and when Dr. Lytton started hypnotizing me I pretended to be in a hypnotic sleep. I was going to confess to being a double personality. I saw at once that was what you and he suspected. But somehow I couldn’t. I played with the idea until I became frantic and then fainted. That wasn’t acting—the faint,” she smiled; “that was real. But it came in handy. “And then this awful farce started. Lieutenant Norton decided to release me and did. And I made for the train at once. I had a feeling that things were wrong with her. I must have taken the same train as Dr. Lytton did. It was quite dark when I got off at Rollo and we didn’t see each other. I made directly for the sanitarium. They admitted me and the doctor was glad I had come. He told me that mother had left two days ago and he didn’t know what had become of her. She had eluded the attendants and vanished.