Excerpt from Dina, or Familiar Faces, Vol. 1 of 3<br><br>I began to suspect that her case was not so hopeless as he supposed it. Her apparent attempt to drown her child weighed little with me. It appeared to me by no means certain that the lady's reputation for daftness might not have helped the milkmaid's imagination to colour the act of simply bathing the boy. Using the privilege of a medical attendant, I argued the point with Sir Angus, and by and by, when the remembrance of happy days spent with his wife in the first years of their marriage softened him, I prevailed so far as to determine him to institute a careful and special inquiry into the state of his wife's mind, with a view to her return home, should that be found possible.<br><br>Already she had been shut up for more than a year, and I was not, I confess, without misgivings that the confinement might have brought her mind, however sane originally, into the very state it was designed to cure; for a sane person conscious of being considered mad by every one he comes in contact with must run considerable risk of being driven distracted.<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.