Fessenden’s face had been composed enough as he told the story, but her imagination had visioned it set and desperate, pictured the swollen chords of his neck, the muscles on his half-naked and bleeding body bulging with rage and resistance. His eye had glazed as Keene arrived and put the assassins to flight, and he had sunk into unconsciousness in bitterness and resentment, believing that he was dying. None of his stories of brilliant and reckless adventure had stirred her like this glimpse into his primeval depths, depths which in the lower types make for ruin, and when rarely in the ken of the great forces of soul and brain are chief among the main-springs of a man’s conquest over Life. The oftener this picture recurred to her, the face convulsed, or indomitable and grim, of the man she understood so well, the more was she persuaded that something had happened to still his energies, or he would have made her a sign before this. It had not needed that story to convince her that his courage would never fail him, but it now served the purpose of suggesting a similar strait where a wild revolt against death availed him nothing. It needed only a shock to send the blood to her head and deliver her nerves from the control of her will, which had struggled hard to keep in office. The shock came, and Maria Leopoldina was the apologetic medium. She entered Ranata’s sitting-room on the sixth morning of the imprisonment with a newspaper, and pointed to a marked paragraph. The news item stated that the famous American, Herr Abbott, had sailed on his yacht from Trieste for New York on the previous day. Then it was that the blood flew to Ranata’s head and stayed there. It disorganized her will, almost her powers of consecutive thought. A moment of forgetfulness and the tide of feeling, of terrified emotion, poured upward again, shaking her body and racking her nerves. She slept but a few hours at night, waking with a load of despair and terror in her brain. Her desperate efforts at self-control, her prayers for strength, were of no avail; for it must be remembered that mental suffering is a physical thing after all, psychical as may be the heights it is flung upon, and, until it has spent itself, as little to be controlled as a fever of the body. There was a constant effort in her throat to gasp, and moments of such utter and tumultuous despair that it seemed to her she saw straight into the soul of her brother during his last tormented moments. For it is in such depths of mental suffering, when the passions are in absolute control of the brain, and the victim if not mad might as well be, that life is taken. The strength in Ranata’s soul fought dumbly and persistently for mastery, and won in the end, but a weaker woman, with imagination and passions as strong, would have killed herself.