Ilse came in with a breakfast tray, her eyes anxious.

“How do you feel, Helena?”

“I’m no longer dizzy, but I’m very worried.”

“You still believe that it happened as you dreamed?”

“Yes I do. Of course I do.”

She patted my hand.

“Don’t think about it. It will fall properly into place as you become more yourself.”

“Ilse, it must have happened.”

She shook her head.

“You have been here all the time.”

“If I could find my wedding-ring I could prove it. It must have slipped off my finger.”

“Dear Helena, there was no wedding-ring.”

I could not speak to her. She was so convinced and alas, convincing.

“Eat this,” she said.

“You’ll feel stronger then. Dr. Carlsberg had a good talk with us after he saw you last night. He has been as anxious as we have. He’s a very clever doctor much in advance of his times. His methods are not always liked. People are old-fashioned. He believes that the mind controls the body to a large extent and he has always tried to prove it. People hate new ideas. Ernst and I have always believed in him.”

That’s why you called him in to me. “

“Yes.”

“And you say he gave me this sedation which produced these dreams.”

“Yes, he believes that if some terrible misfortune overtakes a person the mind and the body have a better chance of recovery if they can be brought to a state of euphoria even if for a short time only. That is briefly his theory. “

“So when this happened, as you say it did, he gave me this drug or whatever it was to let me live in a false world for a few days. Is that what you mean? It sounds crazy.”

‘ “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy.” didn’`t Hamlet say that? It’s true. Oh, Helena, if you could have seen yourself when you came back. Your eyes were wild and you were sobbing and talking incoherently. I was terrified. I remembered my cousin Luisa . that would be your mother’s second cousin. She was locked by accident in the family vault and spent a night there. In the morning she was mad. She was rather like you rather gay and adventurous and I thought this could do to Helena what that did to Luisa and I was determined and so was Ernst-that we would try anything to save you. So we thought of Dr. Carlsberg and we called him in. Yours was just a case that he believed he could cure.

“

“Ilse,” I said, ‘everything that happened is so clear to me. I was married in the hunting lodge. I can remember such detail so vividly.

“

“I know, the dreams produced in this way are like that. Dr. Carlsberg was telling us. They have to be. You have to be torn from this tragedy . and this is the only way.”

“I won’t believe it. I can’t.”

“My dear, why should we, who wish only for your happiness, tell you this if it were not so?”

“I don’t know. It’s a terrible mystery, but I know I am the Countess Lokenberg.”

“How could you possibly be? There is no Count Lokenberg!”

“So he made that up?”

“He didn’`t exist, Helena. He was created out of the euphoric state into which Dr. Carlsberg had put you.”

“But I had met him before.”

I told her, as I was sure I had before, about our meeting in the mist, my visit to the hunting lodge; and how he had sent me back to the Damenstift. She behaved as though she were hearing it for the first time.

“That couldn’'t have been my euphoric dream, could it? I was not under Dr. Carlsberg’s sedation then.”

“That was the source of your dream. It was a romantic adventure. Don’t you see, what happened afterwards was based on that.

He took you to the hunting lodge, planning to seduce you perhaps.

After all, you agreed to go with him and he may have thought you were willing. Then he realized how young you were, a schoolgirl from the Damenstift . “

“He knew that from the beginning.”

“His better nature prevailed; besides, there was the servant there.

You were brought home the next day none the worse for your adventure and mentally this had had a great effect upon you. Dr. Carlsberg will be so interested when he hears of this. It will bear out his theory.

Then came the Night of the Seventh Moon; we lost each other and you were accosted. The man was masked, you have told us. You believed that he was the one whom you had met on another occasion. “

“He was. He called me ” Lenchen”. It was the name he had called me that first time. No one else has ever called me that. There was no doubt who he was.”

“That could have come up in your mind afterwards. Or it might even have been the man. In any case on this second occasion his better nature did not prevail. I must tell Dr. Carlsberg about this meeting in the mist. Or perhaps it would be better if you did.”

I cried: “You are wrong. You are wrong about everything.”

She nodded.

“Perhaps it is better that for a while you do go on believing in your dreams.”

I did eat a little breakfast and as the physical sickness had passed I got up.

I kept thinking of how I had opened the door of that room below and found him, standing there. I could experience the tingling joy the sight of him had given me.

“We’ll be married,” he had said. I had replied that people couldn’'t get married just like that. Here they could, he had assured me. Besides, he was a count and knew how to get things done.

I thought of riding to the hunting lodge and his impatience and the way he had held me against him and the thrills of excitement he communicated to me. I thought of the simple ceremony with the priest.

The marriage lines! Of course I had them. I had put them away carefully. They were in the top drawer of the dressing-table. I remembered putting them with the few pieces of jewellery I possessed, in the little sandalwood box which had been my mother’s.

There was the box. I brought it out joyfully. I lifted the lid. The jewellery was there, but no marriage lines.

I stared at it blankly. No ring. No marriage lines. No proof. It was beginning to look more and more as though they were right and my romance and my marriage were indeed something induced by the doctor’s treatment to wipe out the terrible memory of the dreadful thing that had happened to me.

I don’t know how I got through the day. When I looked at my face in the mirror I saw another person. My high cheekbones stood out more than ever; there were faint shadows under my eyes; but it was the despair which was so startling. The face which looked back at me was touched with a certain hopelessness and that was when I knew that I was beginning to believe them.

Dr. Carlsberg came to see me during the morning. He was delighted, he said, that I was up. He wanted nothing put in the way of my improvement. He was sure that what had to be done now was face the truth.

He sat beside me; he wanted me to talk, to say anything that came into my mind. I explained to him what I had told Ilse, about the meeting in the mist and the night I had spent at the lodge. He did not attempt to persuade me that I had dreamed that.

“If it were possible,” he said, “I should like to obliterate completely from your mind what happened on the Night of the Seventh Moon. That is not possible. The memory is not like a piece of writing in pencil which can be wiped out with an eraser. But it is over. No good can come by preserving the memory of it. So we must come as near to forgetting as possible. I am glad that you are here away from your home. When you return to England which I hope you will not think of doing for at least two months-you will go among people who have not heard what has happened. This will help you to push the affair right to the back of your mind. No one will be able to remind you because they do not know what has happened.”

I said, “Dr. Carlsberg, I can’t believe you. I can’t believe my cousins. Something in me tells me that I am married and that it all happened as I am sure it did.”

He smiled, rather pleased.

“You are still in need of that belief.

Perhaps it is better for you to cling to it for a while. In due course you will feel strong enough to be without it and the truth will be more important to you than the crutch these dreams are at the moment offering you. “

“The time works out perfectly,” I said.

“The second day after the Night of the Seventh Moon we were married and on the morning of the fourth day news came to him that his father was in trouble, and he went. Then the next day I woke up in the room above. It’s simply impossible that I was there all that time.”

“Yet that is what you will accept in time when you are strong enough to discard your crutch.”

“I can’t believe I imagined him.”

“You have attached him to this adventurer you met in the mist. You have told me that your mother often recounted fairy stories and legends of the forest. You came here in a receptive mood; you half believed in the gods and heroes. You say you called him Siegfried.

This made “you an easy subject for this experiment. I am sorry that you were used in this way, but, believe me, it has probably saved your reason.”

“Why should I have thought of such a marriage?”

“Because you were no longer a virgin and you had thought, as a respectably brought-up girl, that this could not be the case without marriage. That’s an easy conclusion. Your terror when you knew what was happening to you has to find its opposite so the dreams gave you this ecstatic union.”

“Why should I have thought him to be a count? I never thought of marrying a count.”