ts--have
they been respectful? Have they been observant? Have they been obedient
to the will of madame? Madame has but to speak!" said the doctor,
bowing politely.

"Why should I speak when every word I utter you believe, or affect to
believe, to be the ravings of a maniac? I will speak no more," said the
lady, turning away her superb dark eyes and looking out of the window.

"Ah, madame will not so punish her friend, her servant, her slave!"

A gesture of fierce impatience and disgust was the only reply deigned
by the lady.

"Come away; she is angry and may become dangerously excited," said the
old doctor, leading the way from the cell.

"Did you tell me this lady is one of the incurables?" inquired
Traverse, when they had left her apartment.

"Bah! yes, poor girl, vera incurable, as my sister would say."

"Yet she appears to me to be perfectly sane, as well as exceedingly
beautiful and interesting."

"Ah, bah; my excellent, my admirable, my inexperienced young friend,
that is all you know of lunatics! With more or less violence of
assertion, they every one insist upon their sanity, just as criminals
protest their innocence. Ah, bah! you shall go into every cell in this
ward and find not one lunatic among them," sneered the old doctor, as
he led the way into the next little room.

It was indeed as he had foretold, and Traverse Rocke found himself
deeply affected by the melancholy, the earnest and sometimes the
violent manner in which the poor unfortunates protested their sanity
and implored or demanded to be restored to home and friends.

"You perceive," said the doctor, with a dry laugh, "that they are none
of them crazy?"

"I see," said Traverse, "but I also detect a very great difference
between that lovely woman in the south cell and these other inmates."

"Bah! bah! bah! She is more beautiful, more accomplished, more refined
than the others, and she is in one of her lucid intervals! That is all;
but as to a difference between her insanity and that of the other
patients, it lies in this, that she is the most hopelessly mad of the
whole lot! She has been mad eighteen years!"

"Is it possible?" exclaimed Traverse, incredulously.

"She lost her reason at the age of sixteen, and she is now thirty-four;
you can calculate!"

"It is amazing and very sorrowful! How beautiful she is!"

"Yes; her beauty was a fatal gift. It is a sad story. Ah, it is a sad
story. You shall hear it when we get through."