n.' If you
had consented, the 'form' would have been a process of hypnotism. Once
or twice repeated, and you would have been wholly under his control, so
that if he willed it and forbade you, you could tell nothing of what he
wished kept secret, and you would have committed any crime he might
suggest. Consider poor Jacob Mason! Remember how he struggled to tell
what he knew, oppressed by the horror of it, and how it all ended! And
remember Henning the clerk, Mayes's tool in that case of bond robbery!
What has happened to him? He committed suicide, as you know, immediately
after Mayes had left him at the barn. Brett, this power of hypnotism, a
power for healing in the hands of a good man, may become a terrible
power for evil in the hands of a villain!"

"But Telfer, to-day? He seems to have known nothing of Mayes, and he
was not one of his regular creatures--Mayes himself told me so."

"About that I don't know. But I expect we shall find that he has been
willingly hypnotised at some time or another, perhaps more than once, by
this same scoundrel Mayes. Possibly in one of Mayes's appearances in
respectable society, at an evening party, or the like. In a case of that
sort the hypnotist may impress a certain formula--a word, a name, or a
number--on the subject's mind, by the repetition of which, at any future
time, that same subject may be instantly hypnotised. So that, once
having become hypnotised, on any innocent occasion, the subject is in
the power of the hypnotist, more or less, ever after. The hypnotist
says: 'When I repeat such and such a sentence or number to you in
future, you will be hypnotised,' and hypnotised the subject duly is,
instantly. Supposing such a case in this matter of Mr. Telfer, it would
only be necessary for Mayes to meet him in the corridor, repeat his
formula and command the victim to bring out the paper he specified. This
done he could similarly order him to _forget the whole transaction_, and
this the victim would do, infallibly."

It is only necessary to say here, parenthetically, that later inquiry
proved the truth of Hewitt's supposition. Twice or three times Mr.
Telfer had been hypnotised in a friend's chambers, by a plausible tall
man whose acquaintance his host had made at some public scientific
gathering. And in the end it became possible to identify this man with
Mayes.

Mr. Moon, of "The Compasses," was of great comfort to me that evening.
My cuts and bruises were washed in his ho