adjusted his
old-fashioned glasses, and commenced to introduce the subject. His
appearance there was certainly quite unexpected, but as I glanced at
Ambler I saw a look of triumph in his face. We were sitting at the
back of the hall, and I knew that Sir Bernard, being short-sighted,
could not recognise us at the distance.

"I am here at Doctor Fulton's invitation to meet our great master,
Professor Deboutin, of whom for many years I have been a follower."
Then he went on to express the pleasure it gave him to demonstrate
before them a case which he declared was not at all uncommon, although
hitherto unsuspected by medical men.

Behind the chair of the new-comer stood the strange-looking old
lady--who answered for her grand-daughter, the latter being mute. Her
case was one, Sir Bernard explained, of absence of will. With a few
quick questions he placed the history of the case before his hearers.
There was a bad family history--a father who drank, and a mother who
suffered from epilepsy. At thirteen the girl had received a sudden
fright owing to a practical joke, and from that moment she gradually
came under the influence of some hidden unknown terror so that she
even refused to eat altogether. The strangest fact, however, was that
she could still eat and speak in secret, although in public she was
entirely dumb, and no amount of pleasure or pain would induce her to
utter a sound.

"This," explained Sir Bernard, "is one of the many cases of absence of
will, partial or entire, which has recently come beneath my notice. My
medical friends, and also Professor Deboutin, will agree that at the
age the patient received her fright many girls are apt to tend towards
what the Charcot School term 'aboulie,' or, in plain English, absence
of will. Now one of the most extraordinary symptoms of this is terror.
Terror," he said, "of performing the simplest functions of nature;
terror of movement, terror of eating--though sane in every other
respect. Some there are, too, in whom this terror is developed upon
one point only, and in such the inequality of mental balance can, as a
rule, only be detected by one who has made deep research in this
particular branch of nervous disorders."

The French professor followed with a lengthy discourse, in which he
bestowed the highest praise upon Sir Bernard for his long and patient
experiments, which, he said, had up to the present been conducted in
secret, because he feared that if it were know