The lady looked wistfully at him and said:
"But my next-door neighbor asserts that she is a queen; she insists
upon being called 'your majesty.' Has she, then, the best right to
know how she should be addressed?"
"Alas! no, Madam, and I am pained that you should do yourself the
great wrong to draw such comparisons."
"Why? Am not I and the 'queen' inmates of the same ward of
incurables, in the same lunatic asylum?"
"Yes, but not with equal justice of cause. The 'queen' is a
hopelessly deranged, but happy lunatic. You, Madam, are a lady who
has retained the full possession of your faculties amid
circumstances and surroundings that must have overwhelmed the reason
of a weaker mind."
The lady looked at him in wonder and almost in joy.
"Ah! it was not the strength of my mind; it was the strength of the
Almighty upon whom my mind was stayed, for time and for eternity,
that has saved my reason in all these many years! But how did you
know that I was not mad? How do you know that this is anything more
than a lucid interval of longer duration than usual?" she asked.
"Madam, you will forgive me for having looked at you so closely, and
watched you so constantly, but I am your physician, you know--"
"I have nothing to forgive and much to thank you for, young man. You
have an honest, truthful, frank, young face! the only one such that
I have seen in eighteen years of sorrow! But why, then, did you not
believe the doctor? Why did you not take the fact of my insanity
upon trust, as others did?" she asked, fixing her glorious, dark
eyes inquiringly upon his face.
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