“Now consider this. As a child she had always called her mother Floria. Her mother died when she was four. Ballau carried the child off and brought her to America. As she grew older the shock experienced in her childhood began to show results. The hallucination that she was her mother began to grow in her and this hallucination finally became so strong that it was able to overpower her normal self and she became Floria. Yes, Floria, the avenging mother whose life Ballau had ruined. “As for the murder,” Dr. Lytton smiled with an air of discussing trifles, “you recall, Julien, that poor Ballau seemed nervous about the engagement. You mentioned things—suspicions—to me. Well, nervous he was. Ballau called her up that night with a very simple message. He wanted to tell her something in relation to the party he was giving. And he was also worried about her. He had noticed symptoms—telltale symptoms of her recurrent mania that day. The sound of his voice over the phone stirred her subconscious mind and brought uppermost the Floria complex. Recall, she said: ‘Yes—yes—immediately. Oh, God!’ She was merely talking as Floria. She left the theater and hurried to the apartment, determined on the vengeance that the Floria who lived in her was continually demanding. “Jane, the housekeeper, let her in. I’ll return to this in a moment. She faced her stepfather in the library. He looked at her and knew what had happened. This was no longer Florence Ballau, but the maniac who thought herself Floria, the lady of the dagger shrieking for vengeance. Poor Ballau knew this creature. He had struggled with her before. It was the secret that he held from the world. We must picture what followed ourselves. Miss Ballau doesn’t remember. Up to this point I have quoted her confession. From here on we reconstruct the scene of the murder. “You see how simple it all grows, Julien? Floria, the lady of the dagger, killed Ballau. She remembers dimly, she says, of striking him with a dagger. She remembers nothing after that for several minutes. Her normality gradually returned. But not entirely. She was able to realize the crime that had been committed, but she was not able to return to Florence Ballau. I neglected, by the way, to say that the purse you found was the property of her mother. And the dress as well. Both items which her maniac self treasured as souvenirs. And when she entered the apartment that night her first impulse was to dress as her mother—in these things that had belonged to the woman. Do you follow me so far, Julien?” De Medici sighed again. The doctor’s words had continued to buzz harmlessly in his ears. His narrow eyes were glancing furtively at the horizontal pattern of the wine-colored drapes. The confusion which had come to him an hour before appeared to have lifted. Through his thought drifted the words: