“I don’t know yet. I will ask Mr. Playmore.” CHAPTER XLI. MR. PLAYMORE IN A NEW CHARACTER. BY that night’s post--although I was far from being fit to make the exertion--I wrote to Mr. Playmore, to tell him what had taken place, and to beg for his earliest assistance and advice. The notes in Benjamin’s book were partly written in shorthand, and were, on that account, of no use to me in their existing condition. At my request, he made two fair copies. One of the copies I inclosed in my letter to Mr. Playmore. The other I laid by me, on my bedside table, when I went to rest. Over and over again, through the long hours of the wakeful night, I read and re-read the last words which had dropped from Miserrimus Dexter’s lips. Was it possible to interpret them to any useful purpose? At the very outset they seemed to set interpretation at defiance. After trying vainly to solve the hopeless problem, I did at last what I might as well have done at first--I threw down the paper in despair. Where were my bright visions of discovery and success now? Scattered to the winds! Was there the faintest chance of the stricken man’s return to reason? I remembered too well what I had seen to hope for it. The closing lines of the medical report which I had read in Mr. Playmore’s office recurred to my memory in the stillness of the night--“When the catastrophe has happened, his friends can entertain no hope of his cure: the balance once lost, will be lost for life.” The confirmation of that terrible sentence was not long in reaching me. On the next morning the gardener brought a note containing the information which the doctor had promised to give me on the previous day. Miserrimus Dexter and Ariel were still where Benjamin and I had left them together--in the long room. They were watched by skilled attendants, waiting the decision of Dexter’s nearest relative (a younger brother, who lived in the country, and who had been communicated with by telegraph). It had been found impossible to part the faithful Ariel from her master without using the bodily restraints adopted in cases of raging insanity. The doctor and the gardener (both unusually strong men) had failed to hold the poor creature when they first attempted to remove her on entering the room. Directly they permitted her to return to her master the frenzy vanished: she was perfectly quiet and contented so long as they let her sit at his feet and look at him. Sad as this was, the report of Miserrimus Dexter’s condition was more melancholy still.