his brain could always work clearly and cleverly. The
lethargy which had occasionally got the best of him had invariably
been due to violent nervous shock or strain, and was as natural as
excessive bodily languor after violent physical effort. Why, then,
should his brain twice have acted as if he had sown it with eccentric
weeds all his life, instead of planting it with the choicest seeds he
could obtain, and watering and cultivating them with a patience and an
interest which had been untiring?

But the explanation of his attempt to put his unborn poem into words
gave him less thought to-day than it had after its first occurrence;
there were other phases of last night's experience weirder and
more unexplainable still. Paramount, of course, was the vision or
dream--which would seem to have been induced by some magnetic property
possessed and exerted by Weir. Such things do not occur without
cause, and he was not the sort of man to yield himself, physically and
mentally, his will and his perceptions, to the unconscious caprice
of a somnambulist. And the scene had cut itself so deeply into the
tablets of his memory that he found himself forgetting more than once
that it was not an actual episode of his past. He wished he could see
Weir, and hear her account of her mental experiences of those hours.
If her dream should have been a companion to his, then the explanation
would suggest itself that the scene might have been a vagary of her
brain; that in some way which he did not pretend to explain, she had
hypnotized him, and that his brain had received a photographic imprint
of what had been in hers. It would then be merely a sort of telepathy.
But why should she have dreamed a dream in which they both were so
unhappily metamorphosed? and why should it have produced so powerful
an impression upon his waking sense? And why, strangest of all, had
he, without thought or self-surprise, gone to her, and with his soul
stirred to its depths, called her "Sioned"? True, she had almost
disguised herself, and had been the living counterfeit of Sioned
Penrhyn; but that was no reason why he should have called a woman who
had belonged to his grandmother's time by her first name. Could
Weir, thoroughly imbued with the character she was unconsciously
representing, have exercised her hypnotic power from the moment she
entered the gallery, and left him without power to think or feel
except through her own altered perceptions? He thrust out hi