Of all forms of mental torture to which a sane human being can be subjected, say which is the worst? To hear the door of your prison cell close behind you, with hope gone, friends alienated, love ruined, home wrecked, and the awful prospect of seven years’ unutterable silence and solitude, knowing before God you are an innocent man? Or to discover, and beat your brains into discord with the knowledge, that being sane, you are the inmate of a lunatic asylum; that, having reason, you are classed with idiots; and that every explanation you can offer will be treated with a mocking laugh? The borderland between sanity and insanity is slighter than many believe or would care to own. If ever man’s brain had been tested to its utmost limits of tension, that brain beat and throbbed in the head of the wretched Frank Onslow. He had lost his adored wife and had found her; he had been granted the supreme hour of reconciliation and rapture, and it was turned into the dull agony of expected death. He had been told that if she awakened from her dull brain stupor, and could mingle her kisses with those of her husband and her child, her life might be spared, and he knew that when she did awake and discovered that her lover and her lord had vanished without a word, she might be dead even now. He might have killed her. He who would have died to give her life, might, for aught he knew, have struck her once more, just as she was tottering into the very arms of death. Everything had failed; utterly, completely failed. Frank Onslow had become gray with grief. The child who should have been in his arms was lost, God knows where. The wife whose life depended upon his honor was either dying or dead. The woman who had by him been changed from a companion into a fiend was triumphant. And he, the hapless victim, was under lock and key, powerless to move, impotent for good or evil. The more the poor creature protested his sanity the more mad he seemed to be. The very situation, the ghastly surroundings, the hideous objects he met on every side, were enough to turn the brain of the strongest man. Insanity is bred in the air like a pestilence. Mad doctors become mad. Nurses, attendants, porters, and servants connected with lunatic asylums in time are devoid of reason. Put a madhouse, private or public, in any given neighborhood, and in the course of years the surrounding villages and neighbors will become as cracked as _King Lear_ himself, as suicidal as _Ophelia_. When Frank Onslow awoke from the stupor of surprise, he found to his horror that he was surrounded by gibbering madmen and crack-brained women. They sneaked round him, pulled him by the sleeve, and babbled nonsense into his ears. They believed that everyone was mad but themselves. They were deceitful, cruel, treacherous, hysterical, and maudlin.