The usual course of events did not apply in this strange case.  There was no jealousy floating on the surface on the part of the husband and wife.  Maud ignored Manfred’s insane attitude towards Flossy because she had the same love-blind sickness and could see no one but Fred. Far from being jealous, Manfred viewed his wife in the light of a white man’s burden which he could not shake off.  Christian’s burden was fiction beside it.  Flossy was the only star in his firmament—­the only toad in his puddle.

The children were neglected, and ran wild in the bush.  It was as though some great Belgian calamity had overtaken the household and had riven it asunder.  The garden lost its lustre, irrigation was discontinued, the fruit trees lost their leaves prematurely; the very willows wept.  The pickets fell from the fence unheeded; the stovepipe smoked, and the chickens laid away in the neighbor’s yard.  The house assumed the appearance of a deserted sty.  Divorce was suggested inwardly—­that modern refuge to which the weak-minded flee in seeking a drastic cure for a temporary ailment; and all this disruption in two hearts which had tripped along together so smoothly and pleasantly.  Surely love, misapplied, is a curse.  It is surely sometimes a severe form of insanity.  If so, those two were insane, just waiting for the pressure to be removed from the brain.  And, theirs was a pitiful and unfruitful case indeed.  They were—­

        Thirst crazed; fastened to a tree,
        By a sweet river running free.

In the meantime Fred and Flossy were having “barrels” of amusement at the expense of the demented ones.  Fred and Flossy were perhaps in the wrong in causing such an upheaval in a very model household.  But they were young, and the mischief had taken root before they suspected that any such danger was in existence.  When the awfulness of the situation dawned upon them they looked at each other one day in the interrogative and agreed that the poisonous weed should be uprooted.  But since it had grown to such proportions it was difficult to arrive at a means by which the evil could be strangled.  Now Fred and Flossy loved each other, and the lady was just waiting for the gentleman to put the motion, so that she would have an opportunity to second it.

The thirst-crazed husband and wife, however, were too blind to observe that anything unusual existed between their two friends, and they continued to float down that smooth but awful river to destruction.

“Why does she not die?” whispered the demon within the man.

“Why does he not fall into the Thompson and get drowned for accommodation?” questioned the evil one in the heart of the woman.

At last the eruption became “Vesuvian,” and the ashes from the crater threatened to re-bury Pompeii—­we mean Ashcroft.  Thoughts of suicide as the only means of relief bubbled up at intervals.

“Give me love or give me death,” they shouted when the fever was at its highest.