imagination; and besides, he has, as I suspect, been superstitiously
brought up as a child. It would be probably useless to argue rationally
with him on certain spiritual subjects, even if his mind was in
perfect health. He has a good deal of the mystic and the dreamer in his
composition; and science and logic are but broken reeds to depend upon
with men of that kind."

"Does he merely listen to you when you reason with him, or does he
attempt to answer?"

"He has only one form of answer, and that is, unfortunately, the most
difficult of all to dispose of. Whenever I try to convince him of his
delusion, he invariably retorts by asking me for a rational explanation
of what happened to him at the masked ball. Now, neither you nor I,
though we believe firmly that he has been the dupe of some infamous
conspiracy, have been able as yet to penetrate thoroughly into this
mystery of the Yellow Mask. Our common sense tells us that he must be
wrong in taking his view of it, and that we must be right in taking
ours; but if we cannot give him actual, tangible proof of that--if we
can only theorize, when he asks us for an explanation--it is but too
plain, in his present condition, that every time we remonstrate with him
on the subject we only fix him in his delusion more and more firmly."

"It is not for want of perseverance on my part," said D'Arbino, after a
moment of silence, "that we are still left in the dark. Ever since the
extraordinary statement of the coachman who drove the woman home, I
have been inquiring and investigating. I have offered the reward of
two hundred scudi for the discovery of her; I have myself examined
the servants at the palace, the night-watchman at the Campo Santo, the
police-books, the lists of keepers of hotels and lodging-houses, to hit
on some trace of this woman; and I have failed in all directions. If my
poor friend's perfect recovery does indeed depend on his delusion being
combated by actual proof, I fear we have but little chance of restoring
him. So far as I am concerned, I confess myself at the end of my
resources."

"I hope we are not quite conquered yet," returned the doctor. "The
proofs we want may turn up when we least expect them. It is certainly
a miserable case," he continued, mechanically laying his fingers on the
sleeping man's pulse. "There he lies, wanting nothing now but to recover
the natural elasticity of his mind; and here we stand at his bedside,
unable to relieve him of