When we came up to my room, he told me to sit down and listen to him, while he himself, as usual, made out a route on the floor, where, with his hands behind him, he could walk up and down while he talked.

He had, he said, considered carefully whether he should conceal from me what he had on his mind, or speak out as he was now doing, but had decided on the latter course, as my recovery depended upon my being perfectly clear as to what it was I was suffering from.  My last illness had, partly at any rate, been an outbreak of a disposition to insanity, which he knew lay in the family on my mother’s side for several generations back.  That this outbreak had now taken place in me was certainly due to the fact that I had given myself up to all kinds of imaginary influences, in conjunction with the idle life which he knew I had always led at home.  The only certain means for stopping the development of this disposition was work with a fixed, determined end in view—­for instance, study—­which he thought I showed an ability for, and in addition a healthy life—­walks, hunting, fishing, companions and interests; but no more idleness, no more exciting novels, no more unhealthy dreams.  He had talked to my father upon the subject, and recommended that I should go to the training college at Trondenaes as a fitting preparation for study, and as a measure that would also afford the necessary interruption to my present life.

When the doctor soon after left me, I remained sitting in my room, serious and much moved.

That I had thus become transparent to myself, and had solved my own riddle, was an extraordinary relief to me—­I may say it was an episode in my life.

The feeling of being mentally ill, which had always, as long as I could remember, lain a silent pressure, a foreboding of unhappiness, in the background of my mind—­although dissipated in the brighter summer-time of my companionship with Susanna—­was therefore no sin, no burden of crime, no dark mysterious exception in me from every other natural order of things, but only a disease, actually only a disease, which was to be treated with a correspondingly natural treatment!

I had never thought that any one could be as glad to hear that he was mad, or at any rate that there was danger of his becoming so, as over-good news; but now I know that such a thing can be.

I prayed now, as it seemed for the first time in my life, really, confidently, and trustfully to God, to whom I stood in the same relation as every one else, or, if there were any difference, even nearer, because I was a poor, sick creature.

I felt as if God’s sun had shone out upon me after a long, weary, rainy day.  I prayed for myself, for Susanna, for my father; and in the enjoyment of this new condition of security I went on to pray first for every single person at home, then for those at the parsonage, then for the clerk, and at last, for want of others, as we do in church, for “all who are sick and sorrowful,” among whom, with a glad heart, I now classed myself.