One warm day in the late fall she brought Reginald in her carriage down to the Dakshas. He was urgent to go there every day, and was often brought down and placed in a long-chair out on their piazza, where, with his volume of Petrarch (from which he was inseparable) he passed many pleasant hours. His facial disfigurement was not as marked as at first. But he was paralyzed through one arm and leg, and the sense of taste, touch and smell seemed deadened. His hearing and his sight were not perceptibly injured, and the childlike alertness of his questions seemed to show that the gray matter of the brain, like a galvanic battery, still generated the electric current sufficiently to produce and accumulate nervous force for the few demands which the partially deadened coarser part of the brain now made upon it. There was evinced by Reginald an utter deadness to the passions of fear, desire, etc. The central ganglia, which serves to do the drudgery of the brain, leaving the gray matter free for higher, more difficult kinds of work, was injured; thus overthrowing the balance of power between the highest meditative, spiritual faculties, and the seat of those practical faculties which insure energetic daily activities. It was as if the partial paralysis which had befallen Reginald Grove had sent a partial sleep to the abused and overtaxed faculties of his animal being; while the higher hemisphere of his brain, so long crippled by inaction, now arousing from that lethargy of disuse, put forth dormant strength. Whether true or not, this was Ethelbert’s theory of the case, and her study of developments confirmed her in it. He was, in a sense, helpless and forceless; yet the childlike, placid clearness of his ideals, and the exhalation of sentiment in view of nature’s beauties, were so inherently clear-cut and rare, that, broken and disorganized though he was, Reginald Grove was now a less disagreeable person to Ethelbert than he had been on his first tumultuous visit. He was seldom pettish or unmanageable when with Ethelbert; but to Mrs. Mancredo his talk was unendurable. She called him a miserable fellow, blaming him passionately to Ethelbert. “But I don’t think he is miserable,” said Ethelbert, in her quiet way. “He was miserable, when in other moments he loathed himself for his self-mismanagement. He acted like a soul in torment the first time he was here; and I fancy he was not then at his worst.”