Page:Magician 1908.djvu/207

 he’d promised to take me to his mother. He would never speak of her, but I felt I must see her. And one day, suddenly, he told me to get ready for a journey, and we went a long way, to a place I did not know, and we drove into the country. We seemed to go miles and miles. And we reached at last a large house, surrounded by a high wall, and the windows were heavily barred. We were shown into a great empty room. It was dismal and cold like the waiting-room at a station. A man came in to us, a tall man, in a frock-coat and gold spectacles. He was introduced to me as Dr. Taylor, and then, suddenly, I understood.”

Margaret spoke in hurried gasps, and her eyes were staring wide, as though she saw still the scene which at the time had seemed the crowning horror of her experience.

“I knew it was an asylum, and Oliver hadn’t told me a word. He took us up a broad flight of stairs, through a large dormitory—oh, if you only knew what I saw there! I was so horribly frightened, I’d never been in such a place before—to a cell. And the walls and the floor were padded.”

Margaret passed her hand across her forehead to chase away the recollection of that awful sight.

“Oh, I see it still. I can never get it out of my mind.”

She remembered with a morbid vividness the vast, misshapen mass which she had seen heaped strangely in one corner. There was a slight movement in it as they entered, and she perceived that it was a human being. It was a woman, dressed in