‘Poor mamma is fast asleep,’ he whispered. ‘And she is so cold!’ She was not dead. The long and frightful mental strain through which she had passed brought on brain-fever, and for some days we despaired of her life; but she came through it bravely; and ere the summer waned, I had the satisfaction of installing both mother and son in a seaside cottage, far enough away from her Berkshire home. Crawford, poor fellow, only lived a few months, for a dangerous fall in the asylum grounds put a merciful termination to his confinement. During those few months, I visited him occasionally, and he always spoke most tenderly of his wife, whom he imagined to be dead. When he died, I went to break the news to his young widow; and while staying in her pretty Devonshire cottage, I solved much that had puzzled me. Her terror at my first introduction to her had been occasioned by the fact that she had at once recognised me as Lennox the mad doctor. I had been pointed out to her in the park the season before. She dreaded Arthur’s incipient madness being known to any one; for she had a blind terror of a lunatic asylum in connection with her idolised husband, and hoped that a quiet country life, free from trouble and contradiction, might in time restore him. But had he never broken out before? I asked, for it seemed to me incomprehensible that so slight a frame should be capable of such courage. Once, she said, only once, and then he had been bent on killing himself. In struggling with him for the possession of the knife, he had accidentally cut her wrist, and so occasioned the ugly scar that disfigured it. As for Bertie’s presence on that fatal night, she told me he had always been accustomed to sleep in their room; and as I had refused to second her theory that the child wanted change of air, and so aid in sending him out of the house, she could devise no other means of getting rid of him. And then I took my leave; and I have never seen Mrs Crawford from that day to this; but still, in spite of a certain pair of sweet brown eyes which make the sunshine of my home, I am forced to admit that there is no woman on earth for whom I have such a boundless admiration as for that unfortunate lady of whom I at one time thought as my First Patient. FYVIE CASTLE.