"Queer!" she echoed. "That's certainly a mild word to use, isn't it?"

"But I mean--hadn't you any idea of what had happened? Didn't you think anything of it except that I had suddenly gone mad? Or that I'd grown to hate you?"

"What was I to think?" she countered, trying to control the tremor that had crept into her voice.

"But did you think that?"

"No," the girl confessed after a pause. "At first, when you started with that drink, I thought you were looking for material for your work. That's what you said--an experiment. Didn't you?"

"I guess so," he groaned.

"But after that, after I'd swallowed that horrible stuff, but before everything went hazy, I--thought differently."

"But what, Pat? What did you think?"

"Why, then I realized that it wasn't you--not the real you. I could feel the--well, the presence of the person I knew; this presence that was tormenting me was another person, a terrible, cold, inhuman stranger."

"Pat!" There was a note almost of relief in his voice. "Did you really feel that?"

"Yes. Does it help matters, my sensing that? I can't see how."

His eyes, which had been fixed on hers, dropped suddenly. "No," he muttered, all the relief gone out of his tones, "no, it doesn't help, does it? Except that it's a meager consolation to me to know that you felt it."

Pat struggled to suppress an impulse to reach out her hand, to stroke his hair. She caught herself sharply; this was the very danger against which she had warned herself--this was the very attitude she had anticipated in Nicholas Devine, the lure which might bait a trap. Yet he looked so forlorn, so wistful! It was an effort to forbear from touching him; her fingers fairly ached to brush his cheek.

"Only a fool walks twice into the same trap," she told herself. Aloud she said, "You promised me an explanation. If you've any excuse, I'd like to hear it." Her voice had resumed its coolness.

"I haven't any excuse," he responded gloomily, "and the explanation is perhaps too bizarre, too fantastic for belief. I don't believe it entirely; I suppose you couldn't believe it at all."

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