ing," I said, "but I stayed at the door
as I heard you talking, and thought there was someone with you."
"Oh," he replied with a smile, "I was only entering my diary."
"Your diary?" I asked him in surprise.
"Yes," he answered. "I keep it in this." As he spoke he laid his
hand on the phonograph. I felt quite excited over it, and blurted
out, "Why, this beats even shorthand! May I hear it say something?"
"Certainly," he replied with alacrity, and stood up to put it in train
for speaking. Then he paused, and a troubled look overspread his
face.
"The fact is," he began awkwardly, "I only keep my diary in it, and as
it is entirely, almost entirely, about my cases it may be awkward,
that is, I mean . . ." He stopped, and I tried to help him out of his
embarrassment.
"You helped to attend dear Lucy at the end. Let me hear how she died,
for all that I know of her, I shall be very grateful. She was very,
very dear to me."
To my surprise, he answered, with a horrorstruck look in his face,
"Tell you of her death? Not for the wide world!"
"Why not?" I asked, for some grave, terrible feeling was coming over me.
Again he paused, and I could see that he was trying to invent an
excuse. At length, he stammered out, "You see, I do not know how to
pick out any particular part of the diary."
Even while he was speaking an idea dawned upon him, and he said with
unconscious simplicity, in a different voice, and with the naivete of
a child, "that's quite true, upon my honour. Honest Indian!"
I could not but smile, at which he grimaced. "I gave myself away that
time!" he said. "But do you know that, although I have kept the diary
for months past, it never once struck me how I was going to find any
particular part of it in case I wanted to look it up?"
By this time my mind was made up that the diary of a doctor who
attended Lucy might have something to add to the sum of our knowledge
of that terrible Being, and I said boldly, "Then, Dr. Seward, you had
better let me copy it out for you on my typewriter."
He grew to a positively deathly pallor as he said, "No! No! No! For
all the world. I wouldn't let you know that terrible story!"
Then it was terrible. My intuition was right! For a moment, I
thought, and as my eyes ranged the room, unconsciously looking for
something or some opportunity to aid me, they lit on a great batch of
typewriting on the table. His eyes caught the look in mine, and
withou
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