n, suddenly, I understood.'

Margaret spoke in hurried gasps, and her eyes were staring wide, as
though she saw still the scene which at the time had seemed the crowning
horror of her experience.

'I knew it was an asylum, and Oliver hadn't told me a word. He took us up
a broad flight of stairs, through a large dormitory--oh, if you only knew
what I saw there! I was so horribly frightened, I'd never been in such a
place before--to a cell. And the walls and the floor were padded.'

Margaret passed her hand across her forehead to chase away the
recollection of that awful sight.

'Oh, I see it still. I can never get it out of my mind.'

She remembered with a morbid vividness the vast misshapen mass which
she had seen heaped strangely in one corner. There was a slight movement
in it as they entered, and she perceived that it was a human being. It
was a woman, dressed in shapeless brown flannel; a woman of great stature
and of a revolting, excessive corpulence. She turned upon them a huge,
impassive face; and its unwrinkled smoothness gave it an appearance of
aborted childishness. The hair was dishevelled, grey, and scanty. But
what most terrified Margaret was that she saw in this creature an
appalling likeness to Oliver.

'He told me it was his mother, and she'd been there for five-and-twenty
years.'

Arthur could hardly bear the terror that was in Margaret's eyes. He did
not know what to say to her. In a little while she began to speak again,
in a low voice and rapidly, as though to herself, and she wrung her
hands.

'Oh, you don't know what I've endured! He used to spend long periods away
from me, and I remained alone at Skene from morning till night, alone
with my abject fear. Sometimes, it seemed that he was seized with a
devouring lust for the gutter, and he would go to Liverpool or Manchester
and throw himself among the very dregs of the people. He used to pass
long days, drinking in filthy pot-houses. While the bout lasted, nothing
was too depraved for him. He loved the company of all that was criminal
and low. He used to smoke opium in foetid dens--oh, you have no
conception of his passion to degrade himself--and at last he would come
back, dirty, with torn clothes, begrimed, sodden still with his long
debauch; and his mouth was hot with the kisses of the vile women of the
docks. Oh, he's so cruel when the fit takes him that I think he has a
fiendish pleasure in the sight of suffering!'

It was more than