"Because, Madam, I have heard you lay claim to that title, and I think
that you yourself, of all the world, have the best right to know how
you should be addressed," said Traverse, respectfully.
The lady looked wistfully at him and said: "But my next-door neighbor asserts that she is a queen; she insists
upon being called 'your majesty.' Has she, then, the best right to know
how she should be addressed?"
"Alas! no, Madam, and I am pained that you should do yourself the great
wrong to draw such comparisons."
"Why? Am not I and the 'queen' inmates of the same ward of incurables,
in the same lunatic asylum?"
"Yes, but not with equal justice of cause. The 'queen' is a hopelessly
deranged, but happy lunatic. You, Madam, are a lady who has retained
the full possession of your faculties amid circumstances and
surroundings that must have overwhelmed the reason of a weaker mind."
The lady looked at him in wonder and almost in joy.
"Ah! it was not the strength of my mind; it was the strength of the
Almighty upon whom my mind was stayed, for time and for eternity, that
has saved my reason in all these many years! But how did you know that
I was not mad? How do you know that this is anything more than a lucid
interval of longer duration than usual?" she asked.
"Madam, you will forgive me for having looked at you so closely, and
watched you so constantly, but I am your physician, you know----"
"I have nothing to forgive and much to thank you for, young man. You
have an honest, truthful, frank, young face! the only one such that I
have seen in eighteen years of sorrow! But why, then, did you not
believe the doctor? Why did you not take the fact of my insanity upon
trust, as others did?" she asked, fixing her glorious, dark eyes
inquiringly upon his face.
"Madam, from the first moment in which I saw you, I disbelieved the
story of your insanity, and mentioned my doubts to Doctor St. Jean----"
"Who ridiculed your doubts, of course. I can readily believe that he
did. Doctor St. Jean is not a very bad man, but he is a charlatan and a
dullard; he received the story of my reported insanity as he received
me, as an advantage to his institution, and he never gave himself the
unprofitable trouble to investigate the circumstances. I told him the
truth about myself as calmly as I now speak to you, but somebody else
had told him that this truth was the fiction of a deranged imagination,
and he found it more convenient and profitable to believe somebody
else. But again I ask you, why were not you, also, so discreetly
obtuse?"