ey and commanded the sunset view.
Such times were times of gaiety though not of prosperity, and far from
the worst hours of life--had they but persisted.

But in the March of 1601 a great calamity fell on these two. A fire,
which consumed several houses near the Corraterie, and flung wide
through the streets the rumour that the enemy had entered, struck the
bedridden woman--aroused at midnight by shouts and the glare of
flames--with so dire a terror, not on her own account but on her
daughter's, that she was never the same again. For weeks at a time she
appeared to be as of old, save for some increase of weakness and
tremulousness. But below the surface the brain was out of poise, and
under the least pressure of excitement she betrayed the change in a
manner so appalling--by the loud negation of those beliefs which in
saner moments were most dear to her, and especially by a denial of the
Providence and goodness of God--that even her child, even the being who
knew her and loved her best, shuddered lest Satan, visible and
triumphant, should rise to confront her.

Fortunately the fits of this mysterious malady were short as they were
appalling, and to the minds of that day, suspicious. And in the
beginning Anne had the support of an old physician, well-nigh their only
intimate. True, even he was scared by a form of disease, new and beyond
his science; but he prescribed a sedative and he kept counsel. He went
further: for sufficiently enlightened himself to believe in the
innocence of these attacks, he none the less explained to the daughter
the peril to which her mother's aberrations must expose her were they
known to the vulgar; and he bade her hide them with all the care
imaginable.

Anne, on this would fain have adopted the safest course and kept the
house empty; to the end that to the horror of her mother's fits of
delirium might not be added the chance of eavesdropping. But to do this
was to starve, as well as to reveal to Madame Royaume the fact of those
seizures of which no one in the world was more ignorant than the good
woman who suffered under them. It followed that to Anne's burden of
dread by reason of the outer world, whom she must at all costs deceive,
was added the weight of concealment from the one from whom she had never
kept anything in her life. A thing which augmented immeasurably the
loneliness of her position and the weight of her load.

Presently the drama, always pitiful, increased in intensity.