‘To bed!’ exclaimed Michael, contemptuously. ‘A man go to bed because he’s had a long ride in the wet and cold, and finds rather a chilly letter to greet him on his return! I am not such an ass.’ But as he spoke, strength seemed to forsake his limbs; he could not stand any more, but sat down again in the chair by the bedside. ‘Perhaps Askam is sitting with her now. I suppose they will be married,’ he said, betraying in his sudden weakness what his secret fear had evidently been. ‘Perhaps she will keep him straight. He needs it, and she has a spirit, though I know Gilbert and my father never thought so; and——’ Here he began to wander in his talk; was shivering and shaking with cold one moment, burning hot the next. The thorough drenching which he had got after leaving the Brydges and riding for miles in the teeth of the bitter wind and rain; the excited condition of his brain over Gilbert’s treachery; the receipt of Magdalen’s letter, with its icy, unyielding egoism, showing him that all these years her own advantage was what she had been thinking of, and that there was not a spark of love for him in her dull heart;—these things broke through even his magnificent health and strength. He could not shake off the physical chill any more than he could the mental prostration. An attack of a tedious, wearing low fever reduced him to perfect physical weakness and docility; but far worse than the fever was the accompanying mental gloom, the result of the shock to the nervous system. The young man, shut up in his room, too weak in body to move and shake off his demon visitant, went through all the horrors of a complete nervous breakdown, and made intimate acquaintance with all its attendant crew of ghastly shades—those pallid ghosts which assemble and gibber and mouth at us when we have so imposed upon our hard-worked servants, nerves and brain, as to have rendered them for the time powerless to answer to our imperious demands. Exhausted, they sink down, and say to us, ‘We can no more,’ and then we are at the mercy of every shadow, every whisper, every vain imagining and thought of horror.