on his part. For the last
few weeks evil dreams had tortured his sleep and cast their shadow upon
his waking hours. They had ever increased in reality, in intensity and
in hideousness. Even now he could see the long, tapering fingers that
every night were groping in the windings of his brain. It was a
well-formed, manicured hand that seemed to reach under his skull,
carefully feeling its way through the myriad convolutions where thought
resides.

And, oh, the agony of it all! A human mind is not a thing of stone, but
alive, horribly alive to pain. What was it those fingers sought, what
mysterious treasures, what jewels hidden in the under-layer of his
consciousness? His brain was like a human gold-mine, quaking under the
blow of the pick and the tread of the miner. The miner! Ah, the miner!
Ceaselessly, thoroughly, relentlessly, he opened vein after vein and
wrested untold riches from the quivering ground; but each vein was a
live vein and each nugget of gold a thought!

No wonder the boy was a nervous wreck. Whenever a tremulous nascent idea
was formulating itself, the dream-hand clutched it and took it away,
brutally severing the fine threads that bind thought to thought. And
when the morning came, how his head ached! It was not an acute pain, but
dull, heavy, incessant.

These sensations, Ernest frequently told himself, were morbid fancies.
But then, the monomaniac who imagines that his arms have been mangled or
cut from his body, might as well be without arms. Mind can annihilate
obstacles. It can also create them. Psychology was no unfamiliar ground
to Ernest, and it was not difficult for him to seek in some casual
suggestion an explanation for his delusion, the fixed notion that
haunted him day and night. But he also realized that to explain a
phenomenon is not to explain it away. The man who analyses his emotions
cannot wholly escape them, and the shadow of fear--primal, inexplicable
fear--may darken at moments of weakness the life of the subtlest
psychologist and the clearest thinker.

He had never spoken to Reginald of his terrible nightmares. Coming on
the heel of the fancy that he, Ernest, had written "The Princess With
the Yellow Veil," a fancy that, by the way, had again possessed him of
late, this new delusion would certainly arouse suspicion as to his
sanity in Reginald's mind. He would probably send him to a sanitarium;
he certainly would not keep him in the house. Beneficence itself in all
other th