ding the papers lately. Chancing to
open one to-day, after a month's complete ignorance of all that had been
happening in the world, I saw the following headline: Suicide of a Lady
in a Lunatic Asylum.

And now I feel as shaken as though I had taken part in a crime; as
though I had had some share in this woman's death.

I am so far to blame that I abandoned her at a moment when it might
still have been possible to save her.... But this is a morbid notion! If
a person wants "to shuffle off this mortal coil" it is nobody's duty to
prevent her.

To me, Agatha Ussing's life or death are secondary matters; it is only
the circumstances that trouble me.

Was she mad, or no? Undoubtedly not more insane than the rest of us, but
her self-control snapped like a bowstring which is overstrained. She
saw--so she said--a grinning death's head behind every smiling face.
Merely a bee in her bonnet! But she was foolish enough to talk about it;
and when people laughed at her words with a good-natured contempt, her
glance became searching and fixed as though she was trying to convince
herself. Such an awful look of terror haunted her eyes, that at her gaze
a cold shiver, born of one's own fears and forebodings, ran through one.

She compelled us to realise the things we scarcely dare foresee....

I shall never forget a letter in which she wrote these words in a queer,
faltering handwriting:

"If men suspected what took place in a woman's inner life after forty,
they would avoid us like the plague, or knock us on the head like mad
dogs."

Such a philosophy of life ended in the poor woman being shut up in a
madhouse. She ought to have kept it to herself instead of posting it up
on the walls of her house. It was quite sufficient as a proof of her
insanity.

I cannot think what induced me to visit her in the asylum. Not pure
pity. I was prompted rather by that kind of painful curiosity which
makes a patient ask to see a limb which has just been amputated. I
wanted to look with my own eyes into that shadowy future which Agatha
had reached before me.

What did I discover? She had never cared for her husband; on the
contrary she had betrayed him with an effrontery that would hardly have
been tolerated outside the smart world; yet now she suffered the
torments of hell from jealousy of her husband. Not of her lovers; their
day was over; but of him, because he was the one man she saw. Also
because she bore his name and was therefore bou