Page:The council of seven.djvu/135

 *thing had passed out of his nature, something had crept in.

He was possessed now by a sense of frustration, anger, defeat. Fully, even whimsically, he was conscious of the unhappy bedfellows who had entered his brain. "It is wonderful," he said, "how a knock on the head may change a man. The short way to madness, I daresay." He spoke with a bitterness that did not belong to his nature.

Such words did not soften Helen's distress. They did not arise from physical suffering; there was neither fever nor pain; he was still a little weak, but otherwise not ill. The cause was within, somewhere deep down, at the root of being. Looking at his drawn face and tragic eyes, listening to his slow, enfeebled voice, the words of Saul Hartz came back to her. "He's down and out already."

Could it be so? Had his will been broken by this blow? Were those high, ennobling hopes which made him the man he was now permanently destroyed? She would not believe it. And yet, as she talked with him, a haunting fear flooded her mind. He was like one who bleeds internally. There was nothing that showed and yet there was dire reason to suspect a lesion of the soul.

In the afternoon, after a playful passage at arms with his mother who was determined to exalt him into "a case," he took Helen as far as the gazebo at the end of the terrace. Here for a full hour they sat with a