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length he said, “I would not give you further pain for all the world. There are people coming tonight. It cannot be helped. Shall I have them turned away? You have only to speak, and it shall be done.”
    “No, do not send them away.” She rose suddenly to her feet, and the twist of hair fell fluttering to the Turkey carpet. “I have been weak. But I shall be strong. You had better go now, Henry, if you would be so kind.”
    That evening she dashed a wineglass over the tablecloth, shrieked that her husband meant to murder her and was led away in hysterics. After this people ceased to say that Mrs. Ireland was a woman of spirit and she retired altogether from polite society.
    What was to be done? Mr. Ireland, in his distracted state, was of the opinion that doctors were needed. Let doctors be summoned! Let the house in Eccleston Square be turned into a sanatorium if it would stop his wife from swearing that he meant to kill her and crooning over a twist of a child’s hair in her lap! The doctors who examined her were cautious. There was no sign of organic disease, they assured Mr. Ireland, but perhaps his wife might benefit from a change of air. A sea voyage, a tour around the Swiss lakes, a month or two at the continental spas sampling the waters—all these were proposed by the deferential gentlemen who stood in Mr. Ireland’s drawing room as a cure for his wife’s lowness of spirits. And meanwhile perhaps it might be best to keep Mrs. Ireland from company, late nights and associations that might be distressing to her.
    Mr. Ireland received this advice with the gravest misgivings. And yet, he assured himself, all was not lost. His wife was estranged from him, but it might be possible, if care were exercised, to win her back. To this end, and mindful of certain ancient connections of his family, he arranged a journey to the country with which he shared his name. Even in the pit of his anxieties, the thought was pleasant to him. An inn or a castle or hilltop where he and his wife could be to each other as they had been in the early days of their marriage—all this, surely, would supply a balm beyond the realm of medicine. And so a passage was booked on the Bristol to Cork ferry for the last day of April, and, in a closed carriage, accompanied by a single servant, the Irelands set off. It was a fortnight since Easter, and the flowers were out in the Wiltshire lanes as they rolled by. What occurred during the three weeks they were away I am not at liberty to say—Mr. Ireland would not speak of it even to his closest friends—but there were no inns, or castles, or hilltops. And from the day of their return there was no more talk of lowness of spirits. The deferential gentlemen who had advised sea voyages and Swiss lakes and the pump room at Baden-Baden were all thrown over, and the celebrated Dr. John Conolly, of whom the world knows, was summoned to give an opinion. Like those he had supplanted, Dr. Conolly was a prudent man. He would not say that his patient was…mad. But perhaps it might be better if Mrs. Ireland were to be removed from Eccleston Square and to a place where care might be taken that she should not injure herself. Throughout these proceedings Mrs. Ireland was confined to her room, and the door of the room was locked with an iron bolt.
    Not the least of our misfortunes is their mockery of bygone hopes. A month after his return to England, Mr. Ireland discovered a parcel thrown amongst the discarded trifles of his dressing room. It contained a copy of Mr. Thackeray’s Irish Sketchbook , which Mr. Ireland had thought it well to carry with him while he surveyed the castles and the hilltops, and a nosegay of flowers presented to his wife on a bright morning in Cork before certain dreadful events of which he could not bring himself to speak. And it seemed to Mr. Ireland, examining these items as he stood in his dressing room with the sun streaming in through the casement window, that his life was ruined