Opposition raised Brandon’s will to such a pitch that at last his guardians had to consider the question very seriously. And they reluctantly saw that beyond the amount of trouble involved there was no real reason why he should not have his way. Prejudice, it was true, also entered into the matter; doctor and nurse agreed that it could not be good for a sick man to visit such a place as Wellwood. But the sick man declared he alone must be judge of that; and as a growing excitement threatened a return of fever, consent was reluctantly given for a letter to be written to the chief medical officer at Wellwood for permission to see John Smith. Millicent Brandon wrote the letter at the invalid’s dictation, devoutly hoping the while that its purpose would fail. Alas for the frailty of human hopes in the scale of official perversity! By return of post came full permission to visit the patient at any time. In the presence of this bombshell nothing was left but to submit with a good grace to the inevitable. Accordingly, in the gray of a December afternoon, Brandon made the journey to Wellwood by motor. It hardly took an hour. Little of the landscape was visible in the winter half-light, and the place itself was unable to reveal the beauties of its setting. Run on modern lines with accommodation for a hundred patients, it had the comforts of a home to offer and a very great deal in the way of human kindness. To one in John Smith’s rank of life it was a place of luxury; to those whose lot had been cast on more liberal lines there was little to complain of in regard to food, housing, reasonable recreation. Yet to each and all of its inmates, from the most open and amenable to the most sullen and defiant, it had one truly dreadful drawback. They were not there of their own free will, but were held by the order of the State. That simple but terrible fact galled one and all like a chain. And few cherished any real hope of ever getting free. “Abandon hope all ye who enter here,” might have been engraved above the pleasant portals of this polite prison. Once behind those doors, the young and the old alike felt themselves caught in the meshes of a deep-laid conspiracy, of a darkness and a subtlety beyond belief. Every attempt at freedom was a struggle against fate, every effort to break the fetters of the law riveted them more securely. From time to time the patients were visited by doctors, magistrates, clergymen, commissioners in lunacy, but these came as a concession to the wisdom and humanity of an abstract conception. Insight, hope, healing, came not in their train.