flew to his brain. For nearly six weeks he
lay prostrate, at the mercy of death; now
raging with the wild strength of
delirium, and now sunk in the speechless,
motionless, sleepless exhaustion which was his
only repose. At last the blessed day came
when he enjoyed his first sleep, and when the
doctor began, for the first time, to talk of
the future with hope. Even then, however,
the same terrible peculiarity marked his
light dreams, which had previously shown
itself in his fierce delirium. From the faintly-
uttered, broken phrases which dropped from
him when he slept, as from the wild words
which burst from him when his senses were
deranged, the one sad discovery inevitably
resulted — that his mind was still haunted,
day and night, hour after hour, by the figure
in the yellow mask.

As his bodily health improved, the doctor
in attendance on him grew, more and more
anxious as to the state of his mind. There
was no appearance of any positive derangement
of intellect, but there was a mental
depression — an unaltering, invincible prostration,
produced by his absolute belief in the
reality of the dreadful vision that he had
seen at the masked ball — which suggested to
the physician the gravest doubts about the
case. He saw with dismay that the patient
showed no anxiety, as he got stronger, except
on one subject. He was eagerly desirous of
seeing Nanina every day by his bedside;
but, as soon as he was assured that his wish
should be faithfully complied with, he seemed
to care for nothing more. Even when they
proposed, in the hope of rousing him to
an exhibition of something like pleasure,
that the girl should read to him for an
hour every day out of one of his favourite
books, he only showed a languid satisfaction.
Weeks passed away, and still, do what they
would, they could not make him so much as
smile.

One day, Nanina had begun to read to
him as usual; but had not proceeded far
before Marta Angrisani informed her that
he had fallen into a doze. She ceased, with
a sigh, and sat looking at him sadly, as
he lay near her, faint and pale and mournful
in his sleep — miserably altered from
what he was when she first knew him. It
had been a hard trial to watch by his bedside
in the terrible time of his delirium; but it
was a harder trial still to look at him now,
and to feel less and less hopeful with each
succeeding day.

While her eyes and thoughts were still
compassionately fixed on him, the door of the
bed-room opened, and the doctor came in,
followed by Andrea d'Arbino, whose share in
the strange adventure with the Yellow Mask
caused him to feel a special interest in the
progress towards recovery.

"Asleep, I see; and sighing in his sleep,"
said the doctor, going to the bedside. " The
grand difficulty with him," he continued,
turning to d'Arbino, "remains precisely what
it was. I have hardly left a single means
untried of rousing him from that fatal
depression; yet, for the last fortnight, he has
not advanced a single step. It is impossible
to shake his conviction of the reality of
that face which he saw (or rather, which he
thinks he saw) when the yellow mask was
removed; and, as long as he persists in his
own shocking view of the case, so long he
will lie there, getting better, no doubt, as to
his body, but worse as to his mind."

"I suppose, poor fellow, he is not in a fit
state to be reasoned with?"

"On the contrary, like all men with a fixed
delusion, he has plenty of intelligence to
appeal to on every point, except the one point
on which he is wrong. I have argued with
him vainly by the hour together. He
possesses, unfortunately, an acute nervous
sensibility and a vivid imagination; and besides,
he has, as I suspect, been superstitiously
brought up as a child. It would be probably
useless to argue rationally with him, on
certain spiritual subjects, even if his mind was
in perfect health. He has a good deal of the
mystic and the dreamer in his composition;
and science and logic are but broken reeds to
depend upon with men of that kind."

"Does he merely listen to you, when you
reason with him, or does he attempt to
answer?"

"He has only one form of answer, and
that is unfortunately the most difficult
of all to dispose of. Whenever I try to
convince him of his delusion, he invariably
retorts by asking me for a rational
explanation of what happened to him at the masked
ball. Now, neither you nor I, though we
believe firmly that he has been the dupe of
some infamous conspiracy, have been able, as
yet, to penetrate thoroughly into this
mystery of the Yellow Mask. Our common sense
tells us that he must be wrong in taking his
view of it, and that we must be right in
taking ours; but if we cannot give him
actual, tangible proof of that—if we can only
theorise, when he asks us for an explanation
—it is but too plain, in his present
condition, that every time we remonstrate with
him on the subject, we only fix him in his
delusion more and more firmly."

"It is not for want of perseverance on my
part," said d'Arbino, after a moment of
silence, " that we are still left in the dark.
Ever since the extraordinary statement of
the coachman who drove the woman home, I
have been inquiring and investigating. I have
offered a reward of two hundred scudi for the
discovery of her; I have myself examined
the servants at the palace, the night-watchman
at the Campo Santo, the police-books,
the lists of keepers of hotels and lodging-
houses, to hit on some trace of this woman;
and I have failed in all directions. If my
poor friend's perfect recovery does indeed
depend on his delusion being combatted by