Mr. Wornock had been taken away, placed under restraint, people told each other, arriving at the fact by the usual inductive process, and on this occasion unhappily accurate in their deduction. Geoffrey was in a doctor's care; a madman with lucid intervals; not violent, except in brief flashes of angry despair, but with occasional hallucinations, that delirium without fever which constitutes lunacy from the standpoint of law and medicine. Before he passed into that dim under-world of the private lunatic asylum, he had, in more than one wild torrent of self-accusation, confessed his treacherous desertion of Allan in Africa, his savage assault upon Allan in the wood. They had met, and Allan had upbraided him for that treacherous desertion, and for stealing his sweetheart. Suzette's name had been like a lighted fuse to an infernal machine; and then the latent savage which is in every man had leapt into life, and there had been a deadly struggle, a fight for existence on Allan's part, a murderous onslaught from Geoffrey. It needed not the opinion of the detective police, nor yet the discovery of Allan's watch and signet-ring under the rotten leaves in the deep hollow of an old oak half a mile from the spot where he himself had been found, to substantiate Geoffrey's self-accusation. His unhappy mother, who was with him at Marsh House throughout those last dreadful hours of raving and unrest, had never doubted his guilt from the time of his reappearance at Discombe. * * * * * It was months before Allan returned to the world of active life; but he left the Manor long before actual convalescence. Not once, during those slow hours of returning health, did he allude to the cause of his terrible illness; and, on his mother timidly questioning him, he professed to have no recollection of the assault which had been so nearly fatal. "Let the past remain a blank, mother. No good can come by trying to remember." He was especially gentle and affectionate to Mrs. Wornock on her rare visits to his room during the earlier stages of his convalescence. Geoffrey's name was not spoken by either; but Allan's sympathetic manner told the unhappy mother that he knew her grief and pitied her. Lady Emily was by no means ungrateful for the lavish hospitality with which Mrs. Wornock's house and household had been devoted to her son, yet she shrank with a natural abhorrence from a scene which was associated with Allan's peril and Geoffrey's crime. No kindness of Mrs. Wornock's could lessen that horror; and Lady Emily did her utmost to hasten the patient's removal to his own house, short of risking a relapse. When she saw him established in his cheerful bedchamber at Beechhurst, she felt as if she had taken him out of a charnel-house into the pleasant world of the living and the happy; a world to which Geoffrey Wornock was fated never to return. "Quite hopeless," was the verdict of medical authority.