understood my case. Do you mind giving me, in few words, your own
impression of what he said?"

"Are you sure that I shall not distress you?"

"On the contrary, you may help me to hope."

"As I remember it," said Lord Loring, "the doctor did not deny the
influence of the body over the mind. He was quite willing to admit that
the state of your nervous system might be one, among other predisposing
causes, which led you--I really hardly like to go on."

"Which led me," Romayne continued, finishing the sentence for his
friend, "to feel that I never shall forgive myself--accident or no
accident--for having taken that man's life. Now go on."

"The delusion that you still hear the voice," Lord Loring proceeded,
"is, in the doctor's opinion, the moral result of the morbid state of
your mind at the time when you really heard the voice on the scene of
the duel. The influence acts physically, of course, by means of certain
nerves. But it is essentially a moral influence; and its power over you
is greatly maintained by the self-accusing view of the circumstances
which you persist in taking. That, in substance, is my recollection of
what the doctor said."

"And when he was asked what remedies he proposed to try," Romayne
inquired, "do you remember his answer? 'The mischief which moral
influences have caused, moral influences alone can remedy.'"

"I remember," said Lord Loring. "And he mentioned, as examples of what
he meant, the occurrence of some new and absorbing interest in
your life, or the working of some complete change in your habits of
thought--or perhaps some influence exercised over you by a person
previously unknown, appearing under unforeseen circumstances, or in
scenes quite new to you."

Romayne's eyes sparkled.

"Now you are coming to it!" he cried. "Now I feel sure that I recall
correctly the last words the doctor said: 'If my view is the right one,
I should not be surprised to hear that the recovery which we all wish to
see had found its beginning in such apparently trifling circumstances
as the tone of some other person's voice or the influence of some other
person's look.' That plain expression of his opinion only occurred to my
memory after I had written my foolish letter of excuse. I spare you
the course of other recollections that followed, to come at once to the
result. For the first time I have the hope, the faint hope, that the
voice which haunts me has been once already controlled by one of the