shall I do?' And he said, 'She has,' and then
she started off screaming enough to make anyone go potty to hear her,
and a lot of boys come and hung about the gate and people was looking
out of windows and the greengrocer was ringing all the time to know if
there was any orders this morning."

"When was all this?" asked Jenny, frozen by the terrible narrative.

"This morning, I keep telling you."

"Just now?"

"No, early. They come and took her away to an asylum somewhere in the
country and we can go and see her once a fortnight. But she's very ill,
the doctor says--some sort of abscess on her brain."

"Where's dad?"

"He went round to the 'Arms.' He said he felt quite shaky."

Jenny sat mute and hopeless. Would her mother never recognize her? Would
she die in the belief that she was neither loved nor appreciated?

Chapter XXXI: _A Document in Madness_

Ashgate Asylum was a great gray accumulation of stone, standing at the
head of a wide avenue of beech trees on a chalky ridge of the Chiltern
Hills. Here in a long ward lay Mrs. Raeburn, fantasies riding day and
night through the darkness of her mind.

Jenny and May used to go once a fortnight to visit her sad seclusion. In
a way it was a fruitless errand of piety, for she never recognized her
daughters, staring at them from viewless eyes. Nobody else in the family
made the slow, dreary journey through the raw spring weather. To be sure
every fortnight Charlie intended to go; but something always cropped up
to prevent him, and as he was unable to realize the need for instancy,
he finally made up his mind to postpone any visit to the early summer,
when, as he optimistically announced, it would no doubt be time to fetch
his wife home completely cured.

Jenny and May used to be met at the railway station by the Asylum
brougham, which would bear them at a jogging pace up the straight
melancholy avenue and set them down by the main entrance beside which
hung the huge bell-chain whose clangor seemed to wake a multitude of
unclean spirits. Often, as they walked nervously over the parquet of the
lobby ample as a cloister, and past a succession of cheerful
fire-places, Jenny would fancy she heard distant screams, horrid cries,
traveling down the echoing corridors that branched off at every few
paces. The nurse who was directing them would talk away pleasantly
without apparent concern, without seeming to notice those patients
allowed a measure of liberty. Jenn