“Yes, I am the doctor. I took the wrong road and lost my way. Are you Mrs. Jordan?” She bowed her head. “Mrs. Alan Jordan. There are three Mrs. Jordans besides myself. My husband’s grandmother and the wives of his two uncles.” “And it is your husband who is ill?” “My husband, yes. I wrote a few days ago to Doctor Carstairs.” (Thirty years ago Carstairs, of Baltimore, was the leading alienist in the country.) “He is coming to-morrow morning; but last night my husband was so restless that I sent for you to-day.” Her rich voice, vibrating with suppressed feeling, made me think of stained glass windows and low organ music. “Before we go in,” I asked, “will you tell me as much as you can?” Instead of replying to my request, she turned and laid her hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Take the chips to Aunt Agatha, Benjamin,” she said, “and tell her that the doctor has come.” While the child picked up the basket and ran up the sunken steps to the door, she watched him with breathless anxiety. Not until he had disappeared into the hall did she lift her eyes to my face again. Then, without answering my question, she murmured, with a sigh which was like the voice of that autumn evening, “We were once happy here.” She was trying, I realized, to steel her heart against the despair that threatened it. My gaze swept the obscure horizon, and returned to the mouldering woodpile where we were standing. The yellow-green had faded from the sky, and the only light came from the house where a few scattered lamps were burning. Through the open door I could see the hall, as bare as if the house were empty, and the spiral staircase which crawled to the upper story. A fine old place once, but repulsive now in its abject decay, like some young blood of former days who has grown senile. “Have you managed to wring a living out of the land?” I asked, because I could think of no words that were less compassionate. “At first a poor one,” she answered slowly. “We worked hard, harder than any negro in the fields, to keep things together, but we were happy. Then three years ago this illness came, and after that everything went against us. In the beginning it was simply brooding, a kind of melancholy, and we tried to ward it off by pretending that it was not real, that we imagined it. Only of late, when it became so much worse, have we admitted the truth, have we faced the reality—” This passionate murmur, which had almost the effect of a chant rising out of the loneliness, was addressed, not to me, but to some abstract and implacable power. While she uttered it her composure was like the tranquillity of the dead. She did not lift her hand to hold her shawl, which was slipping unnoticed from her shoulders, and her eyes, so like dark flowers in their softness, did not leave my face. “If you will tell me all, perhaps I may be able to help you,” I said. “But you know our story,” she responded. “You must have heard it.” “Then it is true? Heredity, intermarriage, insanity?”