en the lightest nourishment, and an acute nervous
susceptibility to all the outward impressions of which she had long
seemed so unconscious; morbidly alive to the faintest sound, shrinking
from the light as from a torture. Her previous impatience at my entrance
into her room became aggravated into vehement emotions, convulsive
paroxysms of distress; so that Faber banished me from her chamber, and,
with a heart bleeding at every fibre, I submitted to the cruel sentence.

Faber had taken up his abode in my house and brought Amy with him; one
or the other never left Lilian, night or day. The great physician spoke
doubtfully of the case, but not despairingly.

"Remember," he said, "that in spite of the want of sleep, the abstinence
from food, the form has not wasted as it would do were this fever
inevitably mortal. It is upon that phenomenon I build a hope that I have
not been mistaken in the opinion I hazarded from the first. We are now
in the midst of the critical struggle between life and reason; if she
preserve the one, my conviction is that she will regain the other.
That seeming antipathy to yourself is a good omen. You are inseparably
associated with her intellectual world; in proportion as she revives to
it, must become vivid and powerful the reminiscences of the shock that
annulled, for a time, that world to her. So I welcome, rather than fear,
the over-susceptibility of the awakening senses to external sights
and sounds. A few days will decide if I am right. In this climate the
progress of acute maladies is swift, but the recovery from them is yet
more startlingly rapid. Wait, endure, be prepared to submit to the will
of Heaven; but do not despond of its mercy."

I rushed away from the consoler,--away into the thick of the forests,
the heart of the solitude. All around me, there, was joyous with life;
the locust sang amidst the herbage; the cranes gambolled on the banks of
the creek; the squirrel-like opossums frolicked on the feathery boughs.
"And what," said I to myself,--"what if that which seems so fabulous in
the distant being whose existence has bewitched my own, be substantially
true? What if to some potent medicament Margrave owes his glorious
vitality, his radiant youth? Oh, that I had not so disdainfully turned
away from his hinted solicitations--to what?--to nothing guiltier
than lawful experiment. Had I been less devoted a bigot to this vain
schoolcraft, which we call the Medical Art, and which, alone