Mrs. Everard was delighted.

"If you do not recover your health here," she said half laughingly
to me on the second morning after our arrival, "I am afraid your
case is hopeless. What sunshine! What a balmy wind! It is enough to
make a cripple cast away his crutches and forget he was ever lame.
Don't you think so?"

I smiled in answer, but inwardly I sighed. Beautiful as the scenery,
the air, and the general surroundings were, I could not disguise
from myself that the temporary exhilaration of my feelings, caused
by the novelty and excitement of my journey to Cannes, was slowly
but surely passing away. The terrible apathy, against which I had
fought for so many months, was again creeping over me with its cruel
and resistless force. I did my best to struggle against it; I
walked, I rode, I laughed and chatted with Mrs. Everard and her
husband, and forced myself into sociability with some of the
visitors at the hotel, who were disposed to show us friendly
attention. I summoned all my stock of will-power to beat back the
insidious physical and mental misery that threatened to sap the very
spring of my life; and in some of these efforts I partially
succeeded. But it was at night that the terrors of my condition
manifested themselves. Then sleep forsook my eyes; a dull throbbing
weight of pain encircled my head like a crown of thorns; nervous
terrors shook me from head to foot; fragments of my own musical
compositions hummed in my ears with wearying persistence--fragments
that always left me in a state of distressed conjecture; for I never
could remember how they ended, and I puzzled myself vainly over
crotchets and quavers that never would consent to arrange themselves