“What is her name, Bubbles?”

“Jenny Ward.”

Dr. Ferris ordered a car, and in less than two hours he was talking with the superintendent of Ottawan about the patient, Jenny Ward.

“The boy,” he was saying, “is a protege of my daughter’s.  She means to educate him, and we are naturally interested in his antecedents.  I wonder if she has any lucid recollection of the father?”

“When she first came she seemed to have lucid moments.  Even now she never makes trouble for any one, except that sometimes she wakes in the night screaming.  She has been very pretty.”

“H’m!” said Dr. Ferris.  “You think she couldn’t tell me anything about the boy’s father?”

“I know she couldn’t.  When she was examined after being committed, it was found that her tongue had been cut out.”

The woman, upon being visited, proved a meek, gentle, pathetic creature, eager to please.  As the superintendent reported, she had been very pretty.  She would have been pretty still, but for her utterly vacant look.

The doctor questioned her, but she made no effort, it seemed, even to understand the questions.  Given a pencil and paper she seemed to take pleasure in making dots, dashes, and scrawls; but she made no mark that in any way represented a letter of the alphabet.  Confronted with a printed page, she thrust it aside.

“Very likely she never could read or write,” said the superintendent; “usually when you give ’em a pencil they make letters by an act of muscular memory.”

In the corridor outside the woman’s room, they encountered one of those nurses who are used in managing the violent insane.  He was a huge fellow, with a dark, strong, and somewhat forbidding face.  He nodded to the superintendent and passed.  Dr. Ferris looked after him down the corridor, had a sudden thought, and communicated it to his host in a quick undertone.

“I say, Gyles!  Look here a moment”

The huge nurse turned on his heel, and came towering back to them.

“Have you ever assisted in looking after the woman Jenny Ward?” and he pointed toward the door of her room.

“No, sir.”

“Dr. Ferris wishes to try an experiment.”

“Yes, sir.”

“He wishes you to throw open the door of her room, and to enter quickly—­upon your knees.”

“On my knees?”

“Yes.”

“All right, sir.”  The man shrugged his big shoulders, and, his face sullen and annoyed, knelt at the door of Jenny Ward’s room, unlocked it, flung it open, and entered quickly.

Over his head the doctors saw an expression of fear, almost unearthly, come over the woman’s face.  And she filled her room and the corridor without with a hoarse and horrible screaming.

Instantly the big nurse rose to his feet, and came out of the room.  His face was passionately angry.  And he said: 

“It’s a shame to frighten her like that.”