Nature had mercifully clogged his head with blood. The rush of it drowned the crying voice of the nerves, deadening for a while both consciousness and pain.

[Pg 64]

[Pg 64]

[Pg 65]

[Pg 65]

XII

Somehow the night had passed—somehow in bitterness, in anguish. But it had passed.

Ernest's lips were parched and sleeplessness had left its trace in the black rings under the eyes, when the next morning he confronted Reginald in the studio.

Reginald was sitting at the writing-table in his most characteristic pose, supporting his head with his hand and looking with clear piercing eyes searchingly at the boy.

"Yes," he observed, "it's a most curious psychical phenomenon."

"You cannot imagine how real it all seemed to me."

The boy spoke painfully, dazed, as if struck by a blow.

"Even now it is as if something has gone from me, some struggling thought that I cannot—cannot remember."

[Pg 66]Reginald regarded him as a physical experimenter might look upon the subject of a particularly baffling mental disease.

[Pg 66]

"You must not think, my boy, that I bear you any malice for your extraordinary delusion. Before Jack went away he gave me an exact account of all that has happened. Divers incidents recurred to him from which it appears that, at various times in the past, you have been on the verge of a nervous collapse."

A nervous collapse! What was the use of this term but a euphemism for insanity?

"Do not despair, dear child," Reginald caressingly remarked. "Your disorder is not hopeless, not incurable. Such crises come to every man who writes. It is the tribute we pay to the Lords of Song. The minnesinger of 

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