Page:The achievements of Luther Trant - Balmer and MacHarg - 1910.djvu/257

Rh might be at once forgotten; as you see it was, for when Ulame aroused her only a few moments later she no longer remembered any part of it.

"You look incredulous, Dr. Pierce! I am not telling you anything that is not well authenticated, and a familiar fact to men of science. If you want corroboration, I can only advise you to trace my statement through the works on psychology in any well-furnished library, where you will find it confirmed by hundreds of specific instances. With a mental disposition like Miss Iris's, an emotion so intense as that she suffered divides itself off from the rest of her consciousness. It is so overpowering that it cannot connect itself with her daily life; ordinary sights and sounds cannot call it back to memory. It can be awakened only by some extraordinary means such as those I used when, as far as I was able, I reproduced for her benefit just now here in your study all the sights and sounds of last Wednesday afternoon that preceded and attended her interview with Canonigo Penol."

"It seems impossible, Mr. Trant," Pierce pressed his hands to his eyes dazedly. "But I have seen it with my own eyes!"

"The sudden sleep into which she had fallen before Ulame aroused her, and the fact that the voice your mother heard seemed to her a strange one," Trant continued, "added strength to my conclusion, for both were only additional evidences of the effect of an intense emotion on a disposition such as Miss Iris's. Now, what was this emotional experience so closely connected with the chalchihuitl stone that the sight of