There was no service at S. Athanasius that morning, and the Rev. Thomas Todd was later on conveyed, still shouting fragments of circus dialogue, to the County Lunatic Asylum. The curate’s mind had temporarily given way beneath the strain of the position in which he had found himself placed, and of the horrible future that lay before him, and his insanity had taken the form of an imaginary return to the scenes of his early life. When, some two years later, he was discharged cured, he attached himself to a mission about to start for the South African Coast, and left England without re-visiting Great Wabbleton.
Long afterwards, Miss Caroline Cope, in a burst of confidence, one day related to her special friend, Miss Lavinia Murby, the doctor’s daughter, how the Rev. Thomas Todd had proposed to her a few days before his melancholy seizure.
“Ah, my dear, you see he couldn’t have been right, even then,” was that lady’s sympathetic comment.
“‘he couldn’t have been right, even then.’”
People I Have Never Met.
By Scott Rankin.