med the colour of the events from which the
disease itself had started. Cold, exposure, long-continued agony of mind
and body--the madness intertwined with an illness which had such roots
as these was naturally a madness of despair. One of its principal signs
was the fixed idea as to Midsummer Day. It never occurred to her as
possible that her life should be prolonged beyond that limit. Every
night, as she dragged herself up the steep little staircase to her room,
she checked off the day which had just passed from the days she had
still to live. She had made all her arrangements; she had even sewed
with her own hands, and that without any sense of special horror, but
rather in the provident peasant way, the dress in which she was to be
carried to her grave.

At last one day, her father, coming unexpectedly into the yard, saw her
carrying a heavy pail of water from the pump. Something stirred within
him, and he went up to her and forcibly took it from her. Their looks
met, and her poor mad eyes gazed intensely into his. As he moved forward
towards the house she crept after him, passing him into the parlour,
where she sank down breathless on the settle where she had been sleeping
for the last few nights, rather than face climbing the stairs. For the
first time he followed her, watching her gasping struggle for breath, in
spite of her impatient motion to him to go. After a few seconds he left
her, took his hat, went out, saddled his horse, and rode off to
Whinborough. He got Dr. Baker to promise to come over on the morrow, and
on his way back he called and requested to see Catherine Leyburn. He
stammeringly asked her to come and visit his daughter who was ill and
lonesome, and when she consented gladly he went on his way feeling a
load off his mind. What he had just done had been due to an undefined,
but still vehement prompting of conscience. It did not make it any the
less probable that the girl would die on or before Midsummer Day; but,
supposing her story were true, it absolved him from any charge of
assistance to the designs of those grisly powers in whose clutch she
was.

When the doctor came next morning a change for the worse had taken
place, and she was too feeble actively to resent his appearance. She lay
there on the settle, every now and then making superhuman efforts to get
up, which generally ended in a swoon. She refused to take any medicine,
she would hardly take any food, and to the doctor's questions she