“For your mother’s sake, Clarian, I command you to wait.  Spare her what pain you can, at least.”

“My mother!  Oh, my God, do not name her! do not name her!”

And he burst into the only tears I ever saw him shed, hiding his face in the bed-clothes, and sobbing piteously.

“What does this mean?” said Mac, as soon as we were where Clarian could not hear us.  “What have you found out?”

“Positively nothing more than you know already,” answered Thorne.

“Nothing?” echoed Mac, very indignantly; “you speak very confidently for one having such poor grounds.”

“My dear Mac,” said Thorne, kindly, “do you think I am not as much concerned about Clarian as you are?  Positively, I would give half I own to arrive at a satisfactory solution of this mystery.  But what can we do?  The boy believes himself a great criminal.  Do you not see at once, that, if we permit him to confess his crime, he will insist upon taking himself out of our keeping,—­commit suicide, get himself sent to the madhouse, or anyhow lose our care and our soothing influence?  We cannot relieve him until we restore his strength and composure.  All we can do now is to watch him, soothe him, and by all means stave off this confession until he is stronger.  It would kill him to face a charge now.  I am inquiring quietly, and, if anything serious has happened, shall be sure to find out his connection with it.”

Though we rebelled against the Doctor’s conclusions, we could not but see the prudence of the course he advised, and so we sat down to watch our poor little friend, gnawed with bitter anxiety, and feeling a sad consciousness that the disease itself under which he suffered was beyond our skilfullest surgery, and one that inevitably threatened the saddest consequences.  A man has grand powers of recovery, so long as his spirit is free; but let him once be persuaded that his soul is chained down forever in adamantine fetters, and, though, like Prometheus, he may endure with silence, patience, even divinely, he is nevertheless utterly incapable of any positive effort towards recuperation.  His faith becomes, by a subtile law of our being, his fact; the mountain is gifted with actual motion, and rewards the temerity of his zeal by falling upon him and crushing him forever.  Such a person moves on, perchance, like a deep, noble river, in calm and silence, but still moves on, inevitably destined to lose himself in the common ocean.  And this was the promise of Clarian’s case.  Whatever was his hidden woe, however trivial its rational results, or baseless its causes, it had beyond remedy seized upon his soul, and we knew, that, unless it could be done away with at the source, the end was certain:  first the fury, then the apathy of madness.  He was no longer tortured with a visible haunting presence, such as had borne him down on that fatal night, but we saw plainly that he had taken the spectre into his own breast, and nursed it, as a bosom serpent, upon his rapidly exhausting energies.