When George Wainwright left the presence of the strange old German doctor, upon whom he had looked with an almost awful anxiety, a half-superstitious hope, it was with an acute sense of disappointment, such as had rarely stung the young man's ordinarily placid and well-disciplined mind. He had the profoundest respect for his father's opinion, the most implicit reliance on his father's judgment; and from the sentence which pronounced the case of Annette hopeless, except under those conditions whose fulfilment he now found it impossible to procure, he never thought of appealing. His father--of whose science in theory, of whose skill in practice, his own experience had offered him innumerable instances--had told him, with genuine concern and with true sympathy, rather than the more formal paternal manner it was the doctor's custom to exhibit towards his son, that this one only hope existed, this solitary chance presented itself. He had caught at the hope; he had endeavoured to reduce the chance to practice; and he had failed. There was bitterness, there was agony, in the conviction, such as had never fallen to the lot of George Wainwright before, though life had brought him some of those experiences which Mr. Dunlop was wont to designate as "twisters" too. But then so much depends on the direction, the strength, and the duration of the "twist," and there are some so easily gotten over. This, however, was not one of them; and George's heart was sorely wrung. The pain was directed cunningly, and strongly applied, and as for its duration--well, George believed, as we all believe when suffering is very keen and very fresh, that it was going to be everlasting. It couldn't be otherwise, indeed, in the sense in which "everlasting" applies itself to this mortal individual life; for did it not mean that the woman he loved, the one woman he really loved and longed for, was doomed for her term of terrestrial existence to the saddest of all destinies, which included utter separation from him? While they both lived, if that fiat should remain unaltered, how should his sorrow be less than everlasting? If it be true that there are certain kinds of trouble, and sharp trouble too, to which men and women do become accustomed, of a surety this was not one of them, but trouble of a vital kind, full of murmuring, of wretchedness, and regret. So long as they both should live--he a sane man, loving this periodically-insane woman as he loved her, with a strong passionate attachment, by no means deficient in the conservative element of intellectual attraction--whence should the alleviation come?