used the word several times, and his father shook his head.

"No, doctor," he heard him saying, "we neither of us approve of it. It is
contrary to the intention of God. Besides, you say the case is normal."

The doctor seemed to be repeating something about nerves and hysteria.
"Exactly," his father replied, "and for that, self-control is needed, and
not a drug that reverses the dispensation of the Almighty."

Both men left the room. Presently the boy heard shrieks. Lying, a grown
man, in his berth, Stefan trembled at the memory of them. He fled in
spirit as he had fled then--out of the window, down the roaring, swimming
street, where he knew not, pursued by a writhing horror. Hours later, as
it seemed, he returned. The shades were pulled down across the windows of
his house. His mother was dead.

Looking back, the man hardly knew how the conviction had come to the
child that his father had killed his mother. A vague comprehension
perhaps of the doctor's urgings and his father's denials--a head-shaking
mutter from the nurse--the memory of all his mother's tears. He was
hardly more than a baby, but he had always feared and disliked his
father--now he hated him, blindly and intensely. He saw him as the cause
not only of his mother's tears and death, but of all the ugliness in the
life about him. "Bohemia," he thought, would have been theirs but for
this man. He even blamed him, in a sullen way, for the presence in their
house of a tiny little red and wizened object, singularly ugly, which the
gray-haired woman referred to as his "brother." Obviously, the thing was
not a brother, and his father must be at the bottom of a conspiracy to
deceive him. The creature made a great deal of noise, and when, by and
by, it went away, and they told him his brother too was dead, he felt