of having their fine intellectual qualities called to account. The
consequence was that their young descendant, who inherited all the
family cleverness, although as yet he had betrayed the possession of
none of its higher gifts, paid the penalty of his mental patrimony.
His brain was abnormally active, both through conditions of heredity
and personal incitement; and the cerebral excitation necessarily
produced resulted not infrequently in violent reaction, which took the
form of protracted periods of melancholy. These attacks of melancholy
had begun during his early school-days, when, a remarkably bright
but extremely wild boy, he had been invariably fired with ambition as
examinations approached, and obliged to cram to make up for lost time.
As years went by they grew with his growth, and few months passed
without an attack of the blues more or less violent, no matter
how brief. They came after hours of brooding over his desire to
distinguish himself, and his fatal want of ability; they came during
his intervals of purely intellectual disgust with himself and with
life; but more frequently still they came upon him from no apparent
cause whatever. They were a part of his personality, just as humor,
or light, unthinking gaiety, or a constantly bubbling wit may form the
predominating characteristic of another man.

For a week after the night of his futile impulse to put into shape
the nebulous verse which had tormented his brain, no one saw Harold
Dartmouth. The violent shock and strain had induced an attack of
mental and spiritual depression which amounted to prostration, and
he lay on his sofa taking no notice of the days as they slipped by,
eating little and speaking to no one. At first Jones, his man-servant,
was not particularly disturbed. He had brought Dartmouth up, and
had come to look upon his moods as a matter of course. He therefore
confined himself to forcing his master to take his food and to