(My
mother had been very careful to drop no hint of the true state of the
case.) At last, however, Mivart told me all he knew about Winifred,
while I hid my face in my pillow and listened.
'In the seizures (which are recurrent) the girl,' he said, 'mimics
the expression of terror on her father's face. Between the paroxysms
she lapses into a strange kind of dementia. It is as though her own
mind had fled and the body had been entered by the soul of a child.
She will then sing snatches of songs, sometimes in Welsh and
sometimes in English, but with the strange, weird intonation of a
person in a dream. I have known something like this to take place
before, but it has been in seizures of an epileptic kind, very unlike
this case in their general characteristics. The mental processes seem
to have been completely arrested by the shock, as the wheels of a
watch or a musical box are stopped if it falls.'
He could tell me nothing about her, he said, nor what had become of
her since she had left his hands.
'The parish officer is taking his holiday,' he added.
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