aid Aunt Grace, sternly.

"Yes, aunt, dare!" cried the girl. "If you do I'll tell poor Bel that
it is one of your hallucinations, and that you have got softening of the
brain."

"Laura!" shrieked the old lady, as she sank back in the nearest chair.
"Oh, that I should live to hear such words! You horrible, abandoned
child!"

"I'm very sorry, auntie," said Laura, coolly, "but you always impressed
upon me that I should tell the truth. You must be getting imbecile, or
you would never have proposed such a dreadful thing."

"Laura!"

"Yes, aunt; it is a sign, too, that you know it is coming on. You must
have been thinking of madhouses, and that made you speak."

"Worse and worse!" wailed the old lady. "You must be getting as bad as
your brother. Actually siding with him now!"

"No, aunt, only pitying him, for I am beginning to believe that he is
suffering worse than we are."

CHAPTER SIXTEEN.

A DANGEROUS CASE.

"It's all over," said Chester to himself. "That doctor's correct, and I
must not trifle or I shall be laid by with something wrong in the head.
That drugging began it, and I'm not right. I won't give up the quest,
but I must get square first, and I can't do so here. I'll pack up and
go on the Continent for a bit. Change may make me able to think
consistently. Now my brain is in a whirl."

He tried to reason calmly, and at last, not feeling in the humour to see
and explain to his sister, he wrote to her briefly, telling her that the
anxiety and worry of the case to which he had been called that night had
completely unhinged him, and he found that the only thing he could do to
recover his tone was to get right away for a time. He was going, he
said, to see a colleague that morning, who would come and take charge of
the practice, and he would write again from abroad.

This done, he fastened down the envelope and left the letter upon the
table, after which he went to his room, threw a few necessaries into a
portmanteau, brought it down, with Aunt Grace carefully watching from
the top of the staircase, and sent the servant for a cab.

Five minutes later he was on his way to his club to consult the
time-tables and guide-book as to the route to take.

He was not long in deciding upon Tyrol as the starting-place for a long
mountain tramp. There was a train at night, and without returning home
he would dine at the club and start from there.

He followed out the earlier portion of his program