Strange Recompense Read Online Free Page B

experienced it can possibly know the terrible desolation of not being able to remember,” he said quietly.
    “How will she react?” Ruth asked. “Now, I mean, while her mind still remains a blank?”
    He looked up quickly.
    “Don’t make the mistake of imagining that this girl isn’t capable of understanding in the ordinary way,” he said. “To my mind, that is the tragedy of it all. The amnesiac looks completely normal, and he keeps his ordinary faculties. It’s just that one particular part of his brain is sealed off—for a day, perhaps for a week or even for months. Sometimes an operation is necessary. Traumatic amnesia is caused by a blow on the head and until the pressure is lifted surgically nothing will give back the memory of what went before.”
    “Months, you said?” Ruth asked sharply. “Perhaps even years. Do you think that—”
    “ I can’t afford to think,” he said almost as sharply. “Medicine is largely a process of elimination. We try this and that, rejecting where we h ave no success, trying some other way. Amnesia is quite often a shield behind which certain minds seek to avoid the unpleasant in life.”
    ‘Somehow I think this is different,” Ruth said, “and so do you. That girl in there isn’t an ordinary type. Her clothes are good and her hands and her hair are well cared for. She speaks nicely, too. There’s something behind all this, something deeply tragic, perhaps. I wish we could discover what.”
    The girl was sitting up on the settee, propped by cushions, her face slightly flushed, her eyes painfully questioning as they searched first Noel’s and then his sister’s.
    “The police?” she asked huskily. “Have they found anything?”
    Noel put down the tray and Ruth noticed that the handkerchief and powder compact were missing from the table. The purse was missing, too—all the girl’s pitiful little possessions. Noel seated himself on the edge of the settee and watched her eat.
    “Take your time,” he commanded. “We’re keeping you here with us for a day or two until we can establish your identity.”
    “Here?” There was relief in the blue eyes raised to his. “But I shouldn’t impose myself on you like this. You don’t know who I am. I don’t even know my own name!”
    “We are going to try to find that out,” Noel said gently, but with a firmness Ruth knew of old. “I’m wondering about this, ” he added when she had finished the soup. “Will you need it? It belongs to you.”
    He produced the handkerchief and powder compact, and the girl put out her hand to take them, her brow still puckered as she examined the scrap of linen with the embroidered name uppermost.
    “Anna,” Noel said, and waited.
    There was no doubt that the name struck a chord somewhere, but it failed to bring the full response he had optimistically hoped for, and he left it for the present.
    “Anna will do as well as any other name just now,” he said. “It has been accepted as a matter of course,” he explained to Ruth as he stood up, “so that it quite possibly does belong to the past. It is not violent enough, however, to shock the senses completely and produce a stronger reaction. You might follow up the embroidery line, by the way. Tomorrow will do. See if she did that sort of thing, either as a hobby or as an actual means of earning a living.” He turned to his patient again, feeling her pulse and nodding his approval, and when he had gone from the room Ruth went forward to the settee.
    “You remember me?” she asked, and was relieved beyond measure when the girl smiled quite naturally.
    “Of course! You were the lady who helped me on the moor.”
    “My brother is doing all he can to help, too,” Ruth said. “He understands this thing so well.”
    “Yes,” the girl said, her eyes lowered to the tray she held across her knees, “he is very kind.”
    “We’re going to call you Anna,” Ruth said. “It’s the name worked on your handkerchief, so we feel