“My God!” he cried, in agony, “I have lost A year.”

This thought crushed him.  By and by he began to carry this awful idea into details.  “My Rosa has worn mourning for me, and put it off again.  I am dead to her, and to all the world.”

He wept long and bitterly.

Those tears cleared his brain still more.  For all that, he was not yet himself; at least, I doubt it; his insanity, driven from the intellect, fastened one lingering claw into his moral nature, and hung on by it.  His soul filled with bitterness and a desire to be revenged on mankind for their injustice, and this thought possessed him more than reason.

He joined the family at breakfast; and never a word all the time.  But when he got up to go, he said, in a strange, dogged way, as if it went against the grain, “God bless the house that succors the afflicted.”  Then he went out to brood alone.

“Dick,” said Phoebe, “there’s a change.  I’ll never part with him:  and look, there’s Collie following him, that never could abide him.”

“Part with him?” said Reginald.  “Of course not.  He is a gentleman, and they are not so common in Africa.”

Dick, who hated Falcon, ignored this speech entirely, and said, “Well, Pheeb, you and Collie are wiser than I am.  Take your own way, and don’t blame me if anything happens.”

Soon Christopher paid the penalty of returning reason.  He suffered all the poignant agony a great heart can endure.

So this was his reward for his great act of self-denial in leaving his beloved wife.  He had lost his patient; he had lost the income from that patient; his wife was worse off than before, and had doubtless suffered the anguish of a loving heart bereaved.  His mind, which now seemed more vigorous than ever, after its long rest, placed her before his very eyes, pale, and worn with grief, in her widow’s cap.

At the picture, he cried like the rain.  He could give her joy, by writing; but he could not prevent her from suffering a whole year of misery.

Turning this over in connection with their poverty, his evil genius whispered, “By this time she has received the six thousand pounds for your death.  She would never think of that; but her father has:  and there is her comfort assured, in spite of the caitiffs who left her husband to drown like a dog.

“I know my Rosa,” he thought.  “She has swooned—­ah, my poor darling—­she has raved—­she has wept,” he wept himself at the thought—­“she has mourned every indiscreet act, as if it was a crime.  But she has done all this.  Her good and loving but shallow nature is now at rest from the agonies of bereavement, and nought remains but sad and tender regrets.  She can better endure that than poverty:  cursed poverty, which has brought her and me to this, and is the only real evil in the world, but bodily pain.”

Then came a struggle, that lasted a whole week, and knitted his brows, and took the color from his cheek; but it ended in the triumph of love and hate, over conscience and common sense.  His Rosa should not be poor; and he would cheat some of those contemptible creatures called men, who had done him nothing but injustice, and at last had sacrificed his life like a rat’s.