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His reductio ad absurdum allowed Wanhope to resume with a laugh, and say that Alford waited at the station in the singleness to which the tactful dispersion of the others had left him, and watched the train rapidly dwindle in the perspective, till an abrupt turn of the road carried it out of sight. Then he lifted his eyes with a long sigh, and looked round. Everywhere he saw Mrs. Yarrow’s smiling face with that inner pathos. It swarmed upon him from all points; and wherever he turned it repeated itself in the distances like that succession of faces you see when you stand between two mirrors.

It was not merely a lapse from his lately hopeful state with Alford, it was a collapse. The man withered and dwindled away, till he felt that he must audibly rattle in his clothes as he walked by people. He did not walk much. Mostly he remained shrunken in the arm-chair where he used to sit beside Mrs. Yarrow’s rocker, and the ladies, the older and the older-fashioned, who were “sticking it out” at the hotel till it should close on the 15th of September, observed him, some compassionately, some censoriously, but all in the same conviction.

“It’s plain to be seen what ails Mr. Alford, now.”

“Well, I guess it is.”

“I guess so.”

“I guess it is.”

“Seems kind of heartless, her going and leaving him so.”

“Like a sick kitten!”

“Well, I should say as much.”

“Your eyes bother you, Mr. Alford?” one of them chanted, breaking from their discussion of him to appeal directly to him. He was rubbing his eyes, to relieve himself for the moment from the intolerable affliction of those swarming eidolons, which, whenever he thought of this thing or that, thickened about him. They now no longer displaced one another, but those which came first remained fadedly beside or behind the fresher appearances, like the earlier rainbow which loses depth and color when a later arch defines itself.

“Yes,” he said, glad of the subterfuge. “They annoy me a good deal of late.”

“You want to get fitted for a good pair of glasses. I kept letting it go, when I first began to get old-sighted.”

Another lady came to Alford’s rescue. “I guess Mr. Alford has no need to get fitted for old sight yet a while. You got little spidery things–specks and dots–in your eyes?”

“Yes–multitudes,” he said, hopelessly.

“Well, I’ll tell you what: you want to build up. That was the way with me, and the oculist said it was from getting all run down. I built up, and the first thing I knew my sight was as clear as a bell. You want to build up.”

“You want to go to the mountains,” a third interposed. “That’s where Mrs. Yarrow’s gone, and I guess it’ll do her more good than sticking it out here would ever have done.”

Alford would have been glad enough to go to the mountains, but with those illusions hovering closer and closer about him, he had no longer the courage, the strength. He had barely enough of either to get away to Boston. He found his doctor this time, after winning and losing the wager he made himself that he would not have returned to town yet, and the good-fortune was almost too much for his shaken nerves. The cordial of his friend’s greeting–they had been chums at Harvard–completed his overthrow. As he sank upon the professional sofa, where so many other cases had been diagnosticated, he broke into tears. “Hello, old fellow!” the doctor said, encouragingly, and more tenderly than he would have dealt with some women. “What’s up?”

“Jim,” Alford found voice to say, “I’m afraid I’m losing my mind.”

The doctor smiled provisionally. “Well, that’s one of the signs you’re not. Can you say how?”

“Oh yes. In a minute,” Alford sobbed, and when he had got the better of himself he told his friend the whole story. In the direct examination he suppressed Mrs. Yarrow’s part, but when the doctor, who had listened with smiling seriousness, began to cross-examine him with the question, “And you don’t remember that any outside influence affected the recurrence of the illusions, or did anything to prevent it?” Alford answered promptly: “Oh yes. There was a woman who did.”