Fancies, memories flitted across his disordered brain, swift as lightning flashes. In a moment Canidia was forgotten, and he was Pentheus, struggling with Agave and her demented crew. They were tearing him to pieces, their fingers were at his throat. Then he was in the East, a defenceless traveller in the tropical desert, surrounded by Thugs. He pointed to one particular spot where he saw his insidious foe—he described the dusky supple figure, the sinuous limbs, gliding serpent-like towards him, the oiled body, the dagger in the uplifted hand. An illustration in Sir Charles Bell's classic treatise had flashed into his brain. So, from memory to memory, with a frightful fertility of fancy, his unresting brain hurried on; while his wife could only watch and listen, tortured by an agony greater than his own. To look on, and to be powerless to afford the slightest help was dreadful. Up and down, and round about the room he wandered, talking perpetually, perpetually waving aside the horrid images which pursued and appalled him, his eyeballs in constant motion, the pupils dilated, his hollow cheeks deadly pale, his face bathed in perspiration.

'Send for Mr. Fosbroke,' said Ida, speaking on the threshold of the adjoining room, to the maid who brought her letters; and, in the midst of his distraction, Brian's quick ear caught the name.

'Fosbroke me no Fosbrokes!' he said. 'I will have no village apothecaries diagnosing my disease, no ignorant quack telling me how to treat myself.'

'I will telegraph for Dr. Mallison, if you like, Brian,' Ida answered, gently; 'but I know Mr. Fosbroke is a clever man, and he perfectly understands—'

'Yes, he will have the audacity to tell you he knows what is the matter with me. He will say this is delirium tremens—a lie, and you must know it is a lie!'

To her infinite relief, Mr. Jardine appeared at this moment. He questioned Towler as to the possibility of tranquillising his patient; and he found that the sedatives prescribed by Dr. Mallison had ceased to exercise any beneficial effect. Nights of insomnia and restlessness had been the rule with the patient ever since Towler had been in attendance upon him.

'I never knew such a brain, or such invention!' exclaimed Towler; 'the people and the places, and the things he talks about is enough to make a man's hair stand on end.'

'The natural result of a vivid memory, and a good deal of desultory reading.'

'Most patients takes an idea and harps upon it,' said Towler. 'It's the multiplication table—or the day of judgment—or the volcanoes and hot-springs, and what-you-may-call-ems, in the centre of the earth; and they'll go on over and over again—always coming back to the same point, like a merry-go-round; but this one is quite different. There's no bounds to his delusions. We're at the North Pole one minute, and digging up diamonds in Africa the next.'

Brian had flung himself upon his bed, rolled in the damask curtain, like
Henry Plantagenet, what time he went off into one of his fury-fits about
Thomas Becket; and Mr. Jardine and Towler were able to talk
confidentially at a respectful distance.