their obvious surprise at the ease with which this great
change had been effected, their frank amazement at the luxury and
silken routine in which they found her, had almost established
relations long since fallen out of use. But the novelty had faded, the
visits grew fewer and shorter, the very telephone messages languished;
and as she sat brooding alone, in the few unoccupied half-hours that
the omniscient System left her, a slow, sure conviction dropped like an
acid on the clouded surface of her mind: she was alone. She was no
longer a part of life as it was ordinarily lived. She and the others
who shared that rich, tended seclusion were apart from the usages and
responsibilities of the World that was counterfeited there. They were
unreal. Through all the exercise and repose, the baths and
manipulations, the music and the silences, the courtesies and the
deprecations, the flowers and the birds that brought an artificial
summer within the thick walls, one idea clanged like a bell through her
weary mind: _This is not real_.

To Dr. Stanchon, who came in the intervals allowed by his work, she
seemed sadly changed. It was not that her face looked heavier and more
fretfully lined; not that her voice grew more monotonous; not that she
seemed sunk in the selfish stupor that her type of suffering invariably
produces. He had seen all this in others and seen it change for a
better state. No; in Miss Mary the settled pessimism of a deep
conviction had an almost uncanny power of communicating itself to those
about her.

"She's in bad, that one," one of the gardeners said to him, on a windy
March day when he had hunted for her over half-a-dozen guarded acres,
and found her sitting in one of her heavy silences under a sunny ledge
of rock.

"She's quiet and easy, but she's one of the worst of 'em, in my
opinion."

And when she turned to him a moment later and said quietly: "Tell me,
once for all, Dr. Stanchon, do you consider me insane?" his voice
expressed all the simple sincerity of his eyes.

"Miss Mary, I tell you the truth--I don't know."

"But you know they'll never let me out?"

He braced himself. "How can they, Miss Mary, when you won't
promise----"

"Why should I promise anything, if I'm not insane? Would you promise
never to state your opinion in your own house?"

He shrugged his shoulders helplessly.

"You see!" he said gently.

Beyond them the gardener struggled with a refractory horse that refu