“You must be mad,” she called after him; then the door opened and the policeman came in.

“Hurry up, Miss, or you’ll have to stay here all night, and you know that would never do,” she heard him say as she hurried away.

Though Josephine’s visit had been painful, it did not succeed in distressing Cromartie for very long. Indeed, after a short time he recovered himself completely, and reasoning upon what she had said, and the reasons of her coming at all, he found much with which to comfort himself. In the first place, all the secret doubts he had had in the last week of his own sanity were now dissipated. He was not going to believe that he was mad, he said to himself, simply because Josephine Lackett told him so. Besides which, he felt sure that she only affirmed that he was mad because it suited her to believe it. If he were actually insane it would relieve her of any necessity of thinking of him, and that she had felt any such necessity to exist was in itself extremely gratifying. Furthermore, he felt certain that if Josephine had really been convinced of his insanity she would not have paid him a visit in order to tell him of it. Even Josephine would not find any satisfaction in such useless inhumanity. If she felt bound to take any steps in the matter she would have gone to the officers of the Society and insisted that he should be examined by a mental doctor, and if necessary certified as a lunatic. And with these very satisfactory reasons Mr. Cromartie assured himself that he was not really mad, or even in any danger of becoming so, though he did not doubt that Josephine would readily persuade herself to the contrary.

Happiness and misery are purely relative, and Mr. Cromartie was now raised into a state of the highest spirits by considerations which would not ordinarily produce such a result. But after the condition of complete despair in which he had been plunged for several weeks, he could hardly imagine any greater bliss than knowing that Josephine was having to persuade herself that he was mad in order to be able to dismiss him from her thoughts.