Trevelyan, when his wife had left him, sat for hours in silence pondering over his own position and hers.  He had taken his child to an upper room, in which was his own bed and the boy’s cot, and before he seated himself, he spread out various toys which he had been at pains to purchase for the unhappy little fellow—­a regiment of Garibaldian soldiers all with red shirts, and a drum to give the regiment martial spirit, and a soft fluffy Italian ball, and a battledore, and a shuttlecock—­instruments enough for juvenile joy, if only there had been a companion with whom the child could use them.  But the toys remained where the father had placed them, almost unheeded, and the child sat looking out of the window, melancholy, silent, and repressed.  Even the drum did not tempt him to be noisy.  Doubtless he did not know why he was wretched, but he was fully conscious of his wretchedness.  In the meantime the father sat motionless, in an old worn-out but once handsome leathern arm-chair, with his eyes fixed against the opposite wall, thinking of the wreck of his life.

Thought—­deep, correct, continued, and energetic—­is quite compatible with madness.  At this time Trevelyan’s mind was so far unhinged, his ordinary faculties were so greatly impaired, that they who declared him to be mad were justified in their declaration.  His condition was such that the happiness and welfare of no human being, not even his own, could safely be entrusted to his keeping.  He considered himself to have been so injured by the world, to have been the victim of so cruel a conspiracy among those who ought to have been his friends, that there remained nothing for him but to flee away from them and remain in solitude.  But yet, through it all, there was something approaching to a conviction that he had brought his misery upon himself by being unlike to other men; and he declared to himself over and over again that it was better that he should suffer than that others should be punished.  When he was alone his reflections respecting his wife were much juster than were his words when he spoke either with her, or to others, of her conduct.  He would declare to himself not only that he did not believe her to have been false to him, but that he had never accused her of such crime.  He had demanded from her obedience, and she had been disobedient.  It had been incumbent upon him, so ran his own ideas, as expressed to himself in these long unspoken soliloquies, to exact obedience, or at least compliance, let the consequences be what they might.  She had refused to obey or even to comply, and the consequences were very grievous.  But, though he pitied himself with a pity that was feminine, yet he acknowledged to himself that her conduct had been the result of his own moody temperament.  Every friend had parted from him.  All those to whose counsels he had listened, had counselled him that he was wrong.  The whole world was against him.  Had he remained in England, the doctors and lawyers among them would doubtless have declared him to be mad.  He knew all this, and yet he could not yield.  He could not say that he had been wrong.  He could not even think that he had been wrong as to the cause of the great quarrel.  He was one so miserable and so unfortunate, so he thought, that even in doing right he had fallen into perdition!