“Why are you looking so down-in-the-mouth, Hugh?” he demanded one morning after breakfast as he sprawled comfortably with his pipe before the crackling fire, agreeable in the chill of the early December day despite the bland golden sunshine of the southern winter. Treherne cast at him a glance helplessly terrified, like a child in the face of danger, and said not a word. “You are losing your relish for country life, I am afraid,” the Colonel went on. “Why, you haven’t put your foot in stirrup for a week. Why don’t you take your horse out for a canter?” The hearty genial tones opened the floodgates of confidence. It was impossible for Treherne to resist the look of affectionate solicitude, of kindly sympathy in those transparently candid eyes. “Colonel,--I’m--I’m--afraid.” “Zounds, sir. Afraid of what?” “Capture,” the hunted creature replied succinctly. “Why, look here, man,” the Colonel rallied him, “I really think you have been captured before this time. How long were you in prison at Camp Chase?” “But, Colonel, this is different. I think my friends--my unfriends,--are bent on restoring me to seclusion.” “Doctor Vailer won’t receive you,--professional pride much lacerated by the criticism of his course expressed by your precious relative, Tom Treherne,--excuse me if I pause here to particularly curse him--and you know when you touch a really learned technician of any sort on his professional pride, you have got hold of his keenest susceptibility, where he feels most acutely and most high-mindedly, the very nerves of his soul, so to speak, his spiritual essence. Doctor Vailer won’t have you.” “But there are other alienists, other asylums in Mississippi.” “And under your favor there is _me_ in Mississippi,--and there is the law of the land. I tell you, Hugh, that Tom Treherne might as well try to bottle up the Mississippi River as to incarcerate you again without Doctor Vailer’s sanction, of course, so long as I am out of the ground.” Hugh Treherne stirred uneasily and crossed and uncrossed his legs as he sat opposite the Colonel in a big mahogany chair before the frowsy hearth where the ashes of nearly all the fires since fall set in were banked behind the big tarnished brass dogs--the Colonel was no dainty housekeeper, and deserved the frequent declaration that “de Cunnel don’t know de diffunce.” “People generally, Colonel, will approve the course of my relations,” Treherne argued. “It will seem the proper thing as long as I am--am--occasionally--absent.” “Well, you are all here, now, in one piece,” declared the old man, wagging his head with vehement emphasis. “It will seem very generous of Tom Treherne to offer, to desire to maintain me at his own expense at a high-priced private sanatorium, since I have no means of my own.”