oxicated man.

"This room is too small!" he almost shouted. "Everything is too small. I
want to dance on the Universe. I want the world to be a football. I want
to play enormous games with giants--" He checked himself abruptly, and
sat down. "Forgive me," he said. "You would understand, if you knew what
I have suffered."

"I can, for one," agreed the doctor heartily.

"And I, indeed," said Monsieur Dupont. "But to proceed with the story--I
think it would be better to commence with what Miss Masters has to tell
us."

He bowed to a gray-haired, grief-stricken woman. There was a pause
before she overcame her emotion sufficiently to speak.

"I took charge of Mary Winslowe's child from its birth," she began, at
last. "She entrusted it to me in her sane moments, and I kept my trust
faithfully. Perhaps it would have been better if I had not."

"You did your duty," the doctor said.

"It was a condition that he should never come under his father's
influence, or even know his real name. He was to be kept in complete
ignorance of the tragedy of his birth. It was necessary for him to be
christened in his proper name to legalize the inheritance of his
mother's fortune, but after that I took him away, and brought him up in
strict accordance with my promises. He was told that both his parents
had been drowned at sea. I gave him the name of John Tranter--Tranter
was an old family name of mine. He was a bonny little fellow. I never
thought that he might have inherited his mother's madness."

"The Laws of Nature are inexorable," said the doctor. "If only the
Second Commandment were given to people as the Law of Nature instead of
the threat of God, it would be of some value."

"I hardly realized it," she went on, "even when the symptoms had
unmistakably developed. But it increased too plainly to be denied. I
hoped and prayed that the horrible disease would pass away from him as
he grew up--but it grew stronger and stronger with him. At last he made
me tell him what it really was. It was against my promise, but he had to
know. I pledged my word that I would keep his secret, and it was
arranged that whenever he felt the approach of an attack he would come
to me. I kept things for him. At first smaller things satisfied him. He
was content to destroy flowers, pictures, prettily colored china,
anything that was beautiful. But after that visit to France, when he was
twenty, there was a change. He never told me what had happened--that