Doll felt that she was an intruder, wrecking the lives of a happily married pair. It was no fault of hers: she had not asked to be created full of love for a man she could never have.
But she felt that she was leading an unnecessary existence, and every moment of it was hurting the man she loved. So she decided to relinquish the gift of life. Joan’s reasoning was that she had been partly responsible for bringing Doll into this world, unasked, and with exactly similar feelings and longings as herself. Ever since she had expected, those feelings had been ungratified, cruelly crushed and thwarted. It wasn’t fair. Doll had as much right to happiness as she. Joan had enjoyed her period of happiness with Will. Now let Doll enjoy hers. So it was that two planes, a mile apart, went spinning into crashes that were meant to appear accidental—and did, except to one man, the one who most of all was intended never to know the truth.
The driver was speaking again.
“It was a ghastly dilemma for us at the club. We saw ’em come down on opposite sides and both catch fire. We have only one fire engine, one ambulance. Had to send the engine to one, and rush this ambulance to the other. The engine couldn’t have done any good at this end, as it happens. Hope it was in time where we’re going!”
Will’s dulled mind seemed to take this in quite detachedly. Who had been killed in the crash he saw? Joan or Doll? Joan or Doll?
Then suddenly it burst upon him that it was only the original Joan that he loved. That was the person whom he had known so long, around whom his affection had centred. The hair he had caressed, the lips he had pressed, the gay brown eyes which had smiled into his. He had never touched Doll in that way. Doll seemed but a shadow of all that. She may have had memories of those happenings, but she had never actually experienced them. They were only artificial memories. Yet they must have seemed real enough to her. The ambulance arrived at the scene of the second crash. The plane had flattened out a few feet from the ground, and not landed so disastrously as the other. It lay crumpled athwart a burned and blackened hedge. The fire engine had quenched the flames within a few minutes. And the pilot had been dragged clear, unconscious, badly knocked about and burned. They got her into the ambulance, and rushed her to a hospital. Will had been sitting by the bedside for three hours before the girl in the bed had opened her eyes.
Blank, brown eyes they were, which looked at him, then at the hospital ward, without the faintest change of expression.
“Joan!” he whispered, clasping her free arm—the other was in a splint. There was no response of any sort. She lay back gazing unseeingly at the ceiling. He licked his dry lips. It couldn’t be Joan after all.
“Doll!” he tried. “Do you feel all right?”
Still no response.
“I know that expression,” said the doctor, who was standing by. “She’s lost her memory.”
“For good, do you think?” asked Will, perturbed.
The doctor pursed his lips indicating he didn’t know.
“Good lord! Is there no way of finding out whether she is my wife or my sister-in-law?”
“If you don’t know, no one does, Mr. Fredericks,” replied the doctor. “We can’t tell which plane who was in. We can’t tell anything from her clothes, for they were burned in the crash, and destroyed before we realized their importance. We’ve often remarked their uncanny resemblance. Certainly you can tell them apart.”
“I can’t!” answered Will, in anguish. “There is no way.”
The next day, the patient had largely recovered her senses, and was able to sit up and talk. But a whole tract of her memory had been obliterated. She remembered nothing of her twin, and in fact nothing at all of the events after the duplication experiment.
Lying on the couch in the laboratory, preparing herself under the direction of Bill, was the last scene she remembered.
The hospital psychologist said that the shock of the crash had caused her to unconsciously repress a part of her life which she did not want to remember. She could not remember now if she wanted to. He said she might discover the truth from her eventually, but if he did, it would take months—maybe even years. But naturally her memories of Will, and their marriage, were intact, and she loved him as strongly as ever.
Was she Joan or Doll?
Will spent a sleepless night, turning the matter over. Did it really matter? There was only one left now—why not assume she was Joan, and carry on? But he knew that as long as doubt and uncertainty existed, he would never be able to recover the old free life he had had with Joan.
It seemed that he would have to surrender her to the psychologist, and that would bring to light all sorts of details which neither he, Joan, nor Bill had ever wished to be revealed.
But the next day something turned up which changed the face of things. While he was sitting at the bedside,
