He showed himself affectionate, then angry, then threatening, but all in vain; the answers which the girl gave him were ever the same.

The story which she related, with its slowly accumulated details, had little by little irrevocably implanted itself in her infantile mind.

And it was no lie on the part of this poor suffering creature, this exceptional victim of hysteria, but an unconscious haunting, a radical lack of will-power to free herself from her original hallucination.

She knew not how to exert any such will, she could not, she would not exert it.

Ah! the poor child, the dear child, so amiable and so gentle, so incapable of any evil thought, from that time forward lost to life, crucified by her fixed idea, whence one could only have extricated her by changing her environment, by restoring her to the open air, in some land of daylight and human affection.