Page:The Fate of Fenella (1892).djvu/236

 CHAPTER XVIII.

"WITHIN SIGHT OF HOME."

all forms of mental torture to which a sane human being can be subjected, say which is the worst? To hear the door of your prison cell close behind you, with hope gone, friends alienated, love ruined, home wrecked, and the awful prospect of seven years' unutterable silence and solitude, knowing before God you are an innocent man? Or to discover, and beat your brains into discord with the knowledge, that being sane, you are the inmate of a lunatic asylum; that, having reason, you are classed with idiots; and that every explanation you can offer will be treated with a mocking laugh?

The borderland between sanity and insanity is slighter than many believe or would care to own. If ever man's brain had been tested to its utmost limits of tension, that brain beat and throbbed in 221