Page:The achievements of Luther Trant - Balmer and MacHarg - 1910.djvu/256

226 on rapidly, "I had three important pieces of evidence. First, the statement of your mother that the voice she heard was that of a strange woman; second, the fact that Miss Iris had gone to her room to take a nap and had been found asleep there on the bed by Ulame; third, that your ward herself denied with evident honesty and perfect frankness that she had been present, or knew anything at all of what had gone on in the study. I admit that without the evidence of the anæsthetic spot—or even with it, if it had not been for the chalchihuitl stone—I should have considered this contradictory evidence far stronger than the other.

"But the immense and obvious influence on Miss Iris of the chalchihuitl stone, when you found it together—an influence which she could not account for, but which nevertheless was sufficient to make her refuse to marry you—kept me on the right track. For it made me certain that the stone must have been connected with some intense emotional experience undergone by your ward, the details of which she no longer remembered."

"No longer remembered!" exclaimed Pierce, incredulously. "When it had happened only the day before!"

"Ah!" Trant checked him quickly. "You are doing just what I told you a moment ago the anæsthetic spot had warned me against; you are judging Miss Iris as though she were like everybody else! I, as a psychologist, knew that having the mental disposition that the anæsthetic spot indicated, any such intense emotion, any such tragedy in her life as the one I imagined, was connected with the chalchihuitl stone,