Yes; he had won. But what was the victory worth? Fame, reward, wealth, all were his; but the one hope of his life was dead. Yet he never spared himself—never ceased work for a day—never hesitated at any sacrifice. He lived, he said, for only one object—it was to ‘wear out his life.’ The old home knew him to the end, and one faithful and devoted woman gave all her years to cheer the one hero of her life, the poor struggling surgeon, the great physician—the man who for pure love had married her only child: Gertrude’s husband! But the end came suddenly at last, and outwardly there seemed to be no signs of failing power. The mind seemed as fresh and as vigorous as ever. Only in one direction did it give way. Years of never-ceasing brooding over his dead wife and child did its work; and as the sad anniversary of his wife’s birthday, her marriage, and of her death, once more approached, the strain overpowered him. A mania seized him; he must offer her the most costly treasures. Yet they must not appear to come from him, but from others, from those who owed their health, their life, to his skill. They must be proofs of his fame—proofs to the dead wife of her husband’s triumph. The mania grew upon him. Wherever he saw anything that was of peculiar value, he seemed to claim it as his own, fully persuaded, as I believe, that it was a willing offering to the memory of his dead wife. And so those once inexplicable disappearances were explained. No one suspected, would dream of suspecting, the great doctor; and sane in everything else, yet with his brilliant intellect already ripe for decay, the unhappy man for weeks past had been the victim of a mania he neither comprehended nor was able to resist. I learnt afterwards that a medical conference had taken him to the house where the countess’s diamonds were lost on that particular morning, and he must by accident have entered the room where the diamonds were momentarily left unguarded, and at once he had been led, by an irresistible impulse, to possess them. * * * * * Before I left that strangely haunted house at Chelsea on that Christmas morning, the twice-stricken mother led me to the dread bedside and placed my hands on the cold face. I looked at the mother, and then I felt the white hands that lay clasped before me. The woman read my thoughts. ‘No,’ she whispered; ‘it is not the flesh of mortal! It is but a fearful counterfeit of death. It was modelled from the dead wife and child, and was to have been reproduced in marble for Gertrude’s tomb. But Gideon West would not have it removed. Call it a morbid fancy or a passionate love, which you will; but for years he has spent the hours of his solitude beside this poor image of his wife!—Now, tell me, was yonder dead man a thief, or was he the victim to unconquerable mania?’ For Gideon West was dead, and his secret died with him.