. You know perfectly well that Dr. Van Anden is not a contemptible
puppy at all. He is a thoroughly educated, talented physician, a
formidable rival, and you know it; and he didn't whine in the least
this evening; he made a very manly apology for what was not so very
bad after all, and you more than half suspect yourself of admiring
him."

"Fiddlesticks!" said Dr. Douglass aloud to all this information, and
went off to his room in high dudgeon.

The next two days seemed to be very busy ones to one member of
the Ried family. Dr. Douglass sometimes appeared at meal time and
sometimes not, but the parlor and the piazza were quite deserted,
and even his own room saw little of him. Sadie, when she chanced by
accident to meet him on the stairs, stopped to inquire if the village
was given over to small-pox, or any other dire disease which required
his constant attention; and he answered her in tones short and sharp
enough to have been Dr. Van Anden himself:

"It is given over to madness," and moved rapidly on.

This encounter served to send him on a long tramp into the woods
that very afternoon. In truth, Dr. Douglass was overwhelmed with
astonishment at himself. Two such days and nights as the last had been
he hoped never to see again. It was as if all his pet theories had
deserted him at a moment's warning, and the very spirit of darkness
taken up his abode in their place. Go whither he would, do what he
would, he was haunted by these new, strange thoughts. Sometimes he
actually feared that he, at least, was losing his mind, whether the
rest of the world were or not. Being an utter unbeliever in the power
of prayer, knowing indeed nothing at all about it, he would have
scoffed at the idea that Dr. Van Anden's impassioned, oft-repeated
petitions had aught to do with him at this time. Had he known that
at the very time in which he was marching through the dreary woods,
kicking the red and yellow leaves from his path in sullen gloom, Ester
in her little clothes-press, on her knees, was pleading with God for
his soul, and that through him Sadie might be reached, I presume he
would have laughed. The result of this long communion with himself was
as follows: That he had overworked and underslept, that his nervous
system was disordered, that in the meantime he had been fool enough
to attend that abominable sensation meeting, and the man actually had
wonderful power over the common mind, and used his eloquence in a way
that was