After Heron Baynet’s departure, the influence of his disclosures became infinitely disturbing to his daughter’s mind.

Inheriting all the prejudices of ignorant generations—the generations who regarded nervous disorders as akin to lunacy, and made torture-chambers of our asylums—Patricia found it almost impossible to realize Peter’s condition. It needed all her reasoning power, all her affection, to conquer those prejudices, to stifle her instinct of revulsion from the abnormal.

She felt immensely sorry for him. She understood; and vowed to save him from the fears which—now that her mind had been opened—she saw behind his eyes. But she could not, at the outset, quite keep the word “madness” out of her thoughts. Mad! Supposing Peter were to go mad?

Nor, in her heart of hearts, could she quite help despising him for his fears—even as she despised Francis Gordon for his idleness. Peter was no longer a Man, her husband, some one to be looked up to, leaned on, consulted in emergencies—but a weakling, a creature to be protected.

For these thoughts, she hated herself; they shamed her, as his fears shamed Peter: and she set herself to conquer them, fearlessly, resolutely. So that, by the end of two days, she had almost accustomed herself to the idea of illness. Peter was ill—she said the word over and over again—ill, not mad, ill with a sickness that she alone could cure.

This idea of illness satisfied the motherhood in her—and of the matehood she was not even yet fully unaware.