r dangerous
questions.

He understood that she wished to escape him.

"Afraid of what?" he asked. "That I shall ask you questions about the
past, concerning your life before we knew each other, and demand a
confession that would wound my love?"

"O Victor!" she cried, distracted. "What more cruel wound could you give
me than these words? My confession! It comprises three words: I love
you; I have never loved any one but you; I shall never love any one but
you. I have no past; my life began with my love."

He could not press it without showing the importance that he attached to
it.

"I do not insist," he said; "it is a way like any other, but better. You
do not wish it, and we will not talk of it."

But he yielded too quickly for her to hope that he renounced his
project, and she remained under the influence of a stupefying terror.
What would she say if he made her talk? Everything, possibly. She did
not even know what thoughts were hidden in the depths of her brain, and
she knew absolutely nothing of this forced somnambulism with which she
was threatened.

At this time the works of the school of Nancy on sleep, hypnotism,
and suggestion, had not yet been published, or at least the book which
served as their starting-point was not known, and she knew nothing of
processes that were employed to provoke the hypnotic sleep. As soon as
her husband left the house she looked for some book in the library that
would enlighten her. But the dictionary that she found gave only obscure
or confused instructions in which she floundered. The only exact point
that struck her was the method employed to produce sleep; to make
the subject look at a brilliant object placed from fifteen to twenty
centimetres in front of the eyes. If this were true she had no fear of
ever being put to sleep.

However, she was not reassured; and when a few days later at a dinner
she found herself seated next to one of her husband's 'confreres', who
she knew interested himself in somnambulism, she had the courage to
conquer her usual timidity concerning medicine, and questioned him.

"Are there not persons with certain diseases who can be put into a state
of somnambulism?"

"It was formerly believed by the public and by many physicians that only
persons afflicted with hysteria and nervous troubles could be put to
sleep in this way, but it was a mistake; artificial somnambulism may be
produced on many subjects who are perfectly healthy."

"Is the w