- Unable to pay for the operation that cured his daughter, a man promises to surrender her to the doctor on her eighteenth birthday. Knowing that the physician wishes to make her the subject of his experiments with hypnotism, the distressed father ultimately reneges on his promise, whereupon the doctor attempts to hypnotize the girl from afar. Under his power, she descends the stairs, where, holding a dagger, she stands over her sleeping father. The next day, the girl is accused of murdering her father, but her sweetheart, a lawyer with an interest in hypnotism, believes that she is innocent and sets out to prove it. After finding a button belonging to the doctor's butler, the lawyer places the servant under his own power, learning thereby that the doctor sent his hypnotized butler to murder the old man. Her name cleared, the girl takes her sweetheart's book on hypnotism and throws it into the fire.—Pamela Short
- The story opens on the girl's eighteenth birthday. Her father, noting the change in her manner, ponders over the cause. His mind goes back to the time when the girl was a child and mentally unbalanced. Unable to pay for an operation, the father agrees to place her in the care of Dr. Sevani, who gives the girl relief from her malady, but under a stated condition that at the end of a certain time, he may use her as a hypnotic subject. The girl has a sweetheart who is a young lawyer and who is also a student of hypnotism. The girl's father calls upon the doctor and refuses to carry out his agreement. That night, while seated by his desk, the father falls asleep. The doctor, in his own home, casts his will over the mind of the girl in her home. She goes downstairs, and to all appearances is about to kill her father with a paper knife as he sleeps. The next morning his dead body is discovered by the butler and others who enter the room. The young lawyer hears of the murder and hurries to the house. The detectives, in making a search, find the bloodstained paper knife bidden in a hat box in a closet of the daughter's room. They cross-question her, and during the third degree, she faints. Believing her guilty, she, with the butler and house-maid, is placed under arrest. The young lawyer, however, believes in her innocence and does some detective work on his own account. In the library he finds a button which he later sees is exactly like those on the waistcoat of the doctor's butler. This leads to other clues which bring about the conviction of the doctor. The young lawyer places the butler under his own hypnotic influence and learns from him exactly how the murder was committed; that the doctor used his influence over the butler, sending him to the house where he murdered the old man. The daughter, also under the doctor's influence, let the butler in and after the deed, locked the door behind him and returned to her own room with the knife. As the story closes the girl takes a book on hypnotism from the lawyer and throws it into the open fireplace.—Moving Picture World synopsis
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