Shadows of Flames: A Novel

XX

It was on a lovely afternoon that they left London for Durham. A Wednesday had been chosen, so that the usual week-end parties going to the country or returning from it might be avoided. A compartment had been reserved. Lady Wychcote went with them, and Gaynor travelled in the same carriage to be at hand in case his master needed him. Chesney, pale as always now, but quite composed, settled down with a copy of Le Mannequin d'Osier. France's brilliant cynicism suited his present mood admirably. Now and then he glanced out toward London as the train drew swiftly away. There was that subtle, just sketched smile about his lips that rested there so often during these days. He seemed to be savouring a pleasant, ironical secret which he alone knew. Lady Wychcote was absorbed in a novel by Mrs. Humphry Ward. She liked the political atmosphere in these books, though she sniffed at the politicians described in them. "Clockworks" she called them. She was very intolerant of the achievements of other women.

Bobby was very good, playing in grave silence with his red and white bricks on the shawl that Miller had spread for ham. But presently he began to shove one up and down along the seat near his father, saying, "Choo! Choo!" Sophy lifted him upon her lap and began to tell him stories in a low voice. She was very glad to be thus mechanically occupied. Dynehurst always depressed her. She felt a vague, grey gloom rising about her at the thought of spending several months there, with Cecil in this strange, cold, forbidding mood. She looked out of the window as she told the oft-repeated story of "The Three Bears," her subconscious mind attending to the tale, her fancy selecting bits in flying hedge and fence that she would jump were she riding to hounds across that country. Purposely she put serious matters from her. The rough music of the train lulled her mind. She seemed caught up by the swift motion, whirled from the ordinary course of life. The fixed events in it seemed like the stations that they passed—existent only in a world already wheeling backward.

By the time that Darlington was reached, Bobby had begun to grow fretful from the journey. He demanded to be given the small engine on its stone pedestal in the station there. "Baby Puff-Puff!" he announced. "Bobby want—Bobby want!" Sophy sent Miller into the next carriage with him. She had seen Chesney's eyes contract and fix upon the boy. The change of train annoyed him. Besides, he was beginning to crave another dose of morphia. The time for the dose to be given by Gaynor had not yet come. When it did it would be so small that it would barely temper the fierce lust of his accustomed nerves. He closed his eyes, frowning, his lip between his teeth. There was a bluish shade about his mouth. His eyes looked sunken thus closed, in the sidelight from the carriage-window.

Sophy watched him anxiously. She saw that Gaynor also glanced towards him from time to time. Lady Wychcote had dozed off, with her little travelling-cushion of green morocco behind her head. She slept tightly, as one might say, her eyelids and lips shut fast. She looked old asleep. Her mouth settled and drew down at the corners. Old and hard and disappointed her face looked under its spotted veil, which from a hardy vanity she had not raised when reading.

Chesney crossed and uncrossed his legs several times. The hand on his knee clenched, until the great knuckles shone yellow with little reddish streaks outlining the bones. The eyes of Sophy and Gaynor met. In answer to her look the valet approached, treading softly.

"Do you not think—considering the long journey—we might give an—an extra dose, Gaynor?" she whispered.

"Yes, madam. I was thinking that," he whispered back.

Chesney's lids flew open at these whisperings, which seemed to have reached him even through the dull roar of the great wheels underneath. His eyes looked hostile and mocking. There was a sort of cold hatred in them. Sophy shivered.

"Quick, Gaynor," she said; "prepare it quickly."

She went over to her husband.

"Are you suffering, Cecil?" she asked pityingly.

"Like hell," he said.

"I was afraid so. I'm so sorry, dear. Gaynor is going to give you some medicine at once."

Incredulity, then an almost foolish softness flowed over his face.

"By God, you're an angel!" he stammered. He seized her hand and covered it with kisses, regardless of the valet's presence. This struck Sophy as very painful. She flushed, drawing her hand away, and saying again:

"I'm so sorry— I should have thought of it before. Dr. Hopkins warned me that the journey might exhaust you."

"And— I say, Sophy—make it double this time, will you? It will be no good else. I'm suffering actual pain, as well as from the lack of the damned stuff. The usual thing won't help me—not the least."

Sophy hesitated. She glanced towards Gaynor. He was holding a spoon filled with water from a little flask over the flame of a spirit lamp. He was absorbed in the delicate task and did not see her look. She glanced back, still doubtful, to her husband. The expression of hatred had again gathered in his eyes. He closed them, trying to smile. This smile was like a grimace of pain and anger. Sophy went quickly over to Gaynor.

"He seems very ill," she murmured. "Might not a little larger dose than usual be better?"

Gaynor glanced, also, at his master. Then he said:

"Yes, I think in this instance it will be better, madam."

He dissolved a half-grain of morphia, drew it up into the little glass syringe, and took it over to his master. Chesney had confessed to taking six grains a day. They had cut this down to half in the past fortnight. Every four hours now for three days Gaynor had been mixing a quarter of a grain at each dose. During the coming week this was to be reduced to an eighth.

Sophy turned aside her head as she saw the man approach Cecil with the little instrument. She could not shake off the horror with which it filled her.

She sat and gazed out, unseeing, at the reeling landscape as the train rushed north—blind to all but the picture that memory painted on the dim curtain of the present. The train rushed north with the ardour of a Titan to a tryst. The great engine panted as with passion. Through the deepening twilight the rolling pasture lands of Durham glowed with a green that was more a feeling than an actual tint. The guard lighted the little lamp in the roof of the carriage. At once the twilight hollowed to a purple gulf through which they sped recklessly.

Now Sophy glanced again at her husband. His head was thrown back against the cushions, his hands relaxed. There was an expression of supreme peace on his quiet face. "The peace that passeth all understanding" flashed through Sophy's mind. She shivered. This peace of Cecil's and that other divine peace were so cruelly removed one from the other. Yet this, too, was "past understanding" for all outside the black magic of its influence. The lamp turned the window-pane near which he sat into a dusky mirror. In its surface she saw repeated the sinister quiet of his profile, and through this reflection of his face dimly she saw the further landscape. Yes, thus it was that she saw the whole world now—through the medium of her husband's image.

When they got out at Dynehurst Station they found the night chilly with a promise of rain in the air. Gaynor hastened forward with his master's overcoat— Bobby was bundled up in Miller's shawl over his little pea-jacket.

Sophy looked regretfully up at the sky, strewn thickly with little shells of cloud. She dreaded a long rainy spell at Dynehurst—the weeping trees, and flowers, and walls. It was like being enclosed in a vast, grey-glass globe streaming with water, to be immured in Dynehurst during a season of rain.

Gerald had sent a waggonette and a brougham to meet them.

"Come with me, Sophy," Cecil said, taking her hand and going toward the brougham.

Side by side they went rolling swiftly between the darkling hedges, across broad pasture lands that gave forth a dank, sweet country perfume of earth and grass. There was a smell of cattle and the breath of cattle in the moist air. These scents and the being so close beside him in the brougham made her feel as though she were repeating her first drive to Dynehurst, taken during her honeymoon. That also had been on a night in May. But then all had been a wonder and a dream. Now she was horribly wide awake. There was no wonder—only a sad surmise, half answered by her own reason already. A long, dim corridor of locked doors seemed stretching before her. She must force each lock, drag him through the opened door with her, and lock it fast again behind them. They might emerge into that "wide place" of which the Psalmist spoke—she could not know. She could only hope; but hope seemed to have dwindled during that painful journey.

They entered the Park. The trees rose dark and blurred about them, deeper shadows on the pale grey shadow of the night. They gave forth a soft, seething sound in the gentle wind. It was as if they sighed in their sleep. A scent of dead leaves blew from the coverts—fresh and bitter. A wholesome autumn smell, mingling oddly with the sound of summer leafage. They passed the chapel, in which service was held every Sunday for the family and servants of Dynehurst. There all the Chesneys were buried. There Cecil would lie some day, and die, and little Bobby—Bobby grown to be a man, an old man maybe, with children and grandchildren of his own to follow. She imagined the dank crypt, and the coffins ranged there. It seemed a horrid way to be buried. She pressed closer to Cecil. She remembered how she had once wished that he would die....

Now the severe, dark mass of the house came into sight, pierced by squares of dusky orange. Against the skyey beach of cloud-shells it reared like a grim cliff. The front door stood wide. Gerald was waiting for them. He came forward to assist Cecil.

"Sorry, old man," he said shyly, holding out his hand. "Have a shoulder?"

"Thanks," said his brother, "but I'm not a cripple, you know."

His tone was good-humoured. He got out first, being nearest the door, then turned to help Sophy.

"How d'ye do, Sophy?" said Gerald. His face lighted up as he saw her. "Glad Cecil seems so fit. Thought the journey might knock him up a bit."

They went into the huge, oppressive hall. The skylight that ran from end to end of its hundred feet looked curiously blind in the glow from lamps and candles. There was a fire burning in the big fireplace at one end.

"Thought you might get chilly driving up," explained Gerald. He was a slight, dark man, rather Celtic in appearance. He was like the great-grandfather, for whom he was named, and who also had been a scholar and a dreamer.

"Good old chap!" said Chesney, expanding in the bright blaze. "Deuced thoughtful of you!" He was as fond of artificial warmth as a cat.

"And I had tea served—though it's only an hour to dinner," continued Gerald. He was much pleased at finding his brother so amiable. He had thought that illness might make him quite unbearable. It was for Sophy's sake that he was so glad. He himself merely kept out of the way when Cecil was outrageous.

The others arrived. Lady Wychcote joined them. Bobby, who was fast asleep, was taken straight to the nursery. Gaynor waited at the door for orders.

"Will you go to your room at once, Cecil, or stay with us a little while?" asked Sophy.

"Think I'll just have a nip of tea first," said Chesney. "Mind you make it strong—no slops, please."

He turned to Gerald.

"They simply brim me with slops now, old boy."

Why he felt so amicably towards Gerald he could not have said. His elder brother usually "got on his nerves." He had never been fond of him, even when they were lads. To-night, though, somehow "good old Gerald" seemed to appeal to him. He found his lank, dark face and shy eyes rather touching. Noticing this, Gerald, on his part, had a nervous feeling that his brother might be going to die, in spite of his apparent strength at the moment. It was so highly unnatural, this excessive cordiality of tone and manner.

Sophy, too, was unpleasantly struck by Cecil's manner to Gerald. She felt sure now that the morphine was accountable for it—that she and Gaynor had given him too much. She felt scared—and very tired. The stillness of the country after London and the train was like a louder roar of occult menace. When she handed him his cup, Chesney gulped the hot, black tea eagerly. He was at the exact point in the effect of that half-grain dose when he craved stimulant. He drank this cup, then another. The heat was grateful to that fade feeling of his stomach, but what he really thirsted for was the more biting burn of raw spirit. Suddenly the floor beneath his feet seemed to become transparent and he could see as though they were actually visible to him the well-stocked wine-cellars of Dynehurst. There was a special brand of cognac stored there—an 1820 vintage, smooth, mellow, powerful—a liquid that was like flame tempered in magic vats. He could taste it, as though a round mouthful actually stung his palate with its smooth, fiery globule. He determined to have a draught of it. How? The morphia cunning pointed out the way. All at once he slipped sideways in his chair, letting the cup drop from his hand. His head fell back. His lip lifted, showing the dry teeth. He looked unspeakably ghastly in the huge limpness of his slackened figure. Sophy and Gaynor ran to him. Gerald also started forward, but his mother caught his arm.

"Wait!" she said sharply. "They know what to do for him."

"Poor old Cecil! It's awful!" muttered his brother, very pale.

Gaynor put his arms about Cecil, as though trying to lift him. When Gerald saw this he broke from his mother and ran to help. Between them they laid Cecil on the floor. He half opened his eyes and moaned. Again his acting was so good that it deceived himself. He felt as he lay there that he was really on the verge of swooning—that only brandy would save him.

"Brandy!" he muttered.

Sophy looked wildly at Gaynor. She was shaking from head to foot.

"I'll get a dose of strychnine ready, madam," he said, turning towards the tea-table. Chesney's lids fell again.

"Brandy!" It was just a whisper.

"Whatever you're going to do, for God's sake do it quickly!" cried Gerald to Gaynor. He spoke in a high, shrill voice. He was terribly excited and alarmed.

"Brandy!" came the faint whisper, almost inaudible.

Gerald sprang up, rushed from the room. As Gaynor was heating water in a teaspoon to prepare the strychnine, he rushed back again, a bottle of brandy and a liqueur glass in his hand.

"Here!" he cried. "At least try this while the other's being got ready."

Gaynor's hand shook so that he slopped the water he had already prepared, and had to begin all over.

"Oh, hurry, Gaynor—hurry!" cried Sophy, in despair. Cecil seemed to have fainted again.

"Let's try this—do let's try this," urged Gerald, kneeling down by her.

"I'm afraid," she murmured. She was white to the lips. "They say it's so bad for him."

Gaynor came forward with the hypodermic needle. Sophy held it, shivering with repulsion, while the valet unfastened his master's sleeve-links and pushed back his sleeve.

"Good God! What's the matter with his arm?" whispered Gerald hoarsely. Sophy felt sick to death. Life seemed to her like a sickness—a disease. She, too, had caught a glimpse of the disfigured flesh.

"Result of the fever, your lordship," said Gaynor in a low voice. He thrust the needle skilfully home between two less recent punctures. Gerald drew back as though it had entered his own arm.

"He'll revive now, your lordship," said the valet in the same even voice. They waited. Cecil lay there motionless, his lip still curled back over his teeth. After a few moments:

"Brandy!" he breathed again.

"For God's sake, give it to him ... give it to him, Sophy!" Gerald urged.

Gaynor had his master's wrist in his fingers. "His pulse is slow, madam, but not bad," he said. Yet there was something of alarm, too, in his quiet face. They waited a few seconds. Then Chesney's lips again just formed the word that he seemed no longer able to utter.

"Oh, try the brandy—just try it!" Gerald said again.

Sophy looked at Gaynor. His eyes were on his master's face.

"Gaynor—do you think? Might we?"

"I hardly know what to say, madam."

"Here! I'll give it him— I'll risk it," said Gerald. He thrust his arm under his brother's neck, and held the little glass of spirit to his lips. Chesney drank feebly. Some of the brandy ran from the corner of his mouth.

"Here! fill it again!" said Gerald imperiously to Gaynor. Like all superficially timid people, he was overbold once his timidity was conquered.

The valet looked at Sophy before obeying. She did not see this look. She was staring at Cecil's face. The thought had come to her: "Is it all real? Is he really as ill as he seems?"

Gaynor had no course but to obey Lord Wychcote. He merely said very low as he poured out the brandy:

"The doctor says it's very bad for him, your lordship."

But Gerald was past heeding such warnings. His usually rough, almost brutal, brother had spoken to him with peculiar kindness only a few moments ago. Now he lay there looking as though death had seized him. Gerald had felt that presentiment of his death. He could not stand inertly by, while others trifled with the red-tape of doctors' orders. He gave Cecil the second glass of brandy. Every drop was swallowed this time. The delicious fire burned its pleasant path to the very pit of the craving stomach. Cecil felt that he really loved his brother. He lifted his languid lids and gave him a look of grateful affection.

Lady Wychcote still stood by the tea-table, her handkerchief against her lips. She had not moved a muscle during this scene.

Of all those present, she was the only one who, from first to last, had felt sure that the attack was simulated. She was torn between humiliation that a son of hers should condescend to such mummery, and an odd, unwilling admiration for the skill with which it was done.

"He always had the will of demons," she told herself now. "I must put Bellamy on his guard." It was perhaps natural that, with her ignorance in regard to the habit of morphia, she should find this deadly determination to procure spirits far more alarming. Her youngest brother, a brilliant man, had drunk himself to death at forty-one.

Yes, she must speak to Bellamy. They must have a professional nurse for Cecil.

She went to bed, feeling full her age that night.

XXI

Chesney kept his bed, as always in the morning. He had waked with a dull headache from the unaccustomed dose of brandy on an empty stomach. Waking too early, in the iron-grey, streaming dawn, he had lain there between the sheets that felt so clammy to his nervous skin which again craved morphia—unable to get it until Gaynor should have left the room—racked mentally, also, by a nauseating shame for the part that he had played last evening. In this interval between dose and dose, worse than the physical malaise which amounted to torment, was the sense of his own vileness. Now he hated Gerald for running to fetch the brandy. For the same thing which he had loved him for last night, he hated him this morning. Fool! If he hadn't been so damnably officious, perhaps they might not have given him the brandy. Yes, he wished heartily now that his will had been denied him by force. Besides, he would have to see Bellamy sometime this morning, and he was all to bits—he could feel that his face looked unnatural, deathly. And at the same time the craving for stimulant came over him again. He asked for a cup of black coffee. "Make it yourself," he said to Gaynor. "In that French machine of mine. I don't want the filth an English cook calls coffee."

While Gaynor was thus engaged he managed to crawl from bed and take a quarter grain of morphia in addition to the other quarter that Gaynor had just given him. He found a place for the needle on his thigh far up near the hip-bone. It was too near the head of the sciatic nerve, and hurt him unusually. He almost broke the needle in his flesh, from irritation and the awkwardness of using the syringe so high up on his leg. He had no time to put the wire through the needle or to clean it properly before the man came back with the coffee.

"Damned nuisance," he thought. "Some day I shall be giving myself an abscess." But the extra dose and the coffee together braced and calmed him. He looked tolerably normal after he had had a tub and Gaynor had shaved him.

"I'll put on a dressing-gown and sit in that armchair with a rug over me," he said. One felt such a helpless carcass in bed when those brutes of quacks came peering and asking their impudent questions.

Sophy felt encouraged when she saw him thus established in the big chair. She had passed a wretched night. Her doubt of him—of the genuineness of his attack—had seemed so shameful to her—yet she could not help doubting. And if her doubt were justified—what abysms opened before her—before them both! What salvation could there be for one so deliberately, cunningly false?

"You look so much better," she said. "Perhaps this is the best thing for you, really—the country—the perfect quiet of it."

"The brandy is what did this bit of improvement," he replied calmly. He must brave it out. Besides, there was that only half-stilled craving deep underneath the caution of his present mood. He added reasonably: "You can't cut a chap off from a thing that he's as used to as I am to spirit of some sort without making him suffer rather severely."

"It's only that the doctor said it was so bad for you, Cecil."

"Pf! That ass Hopkins! Now Bellamy has to bray his little bray. We'll see what he says."

Giles Bellamy came at ten o'clock He was a good-looking man of about forty, with short-sighted, intelligent brown eyes that were rather too large for a man, and a pale, clever face set in a Vandyke beard. This beard and his large eyes, that looked almost womanishly soft at times, had gained him the nickname of O. P. from Cecil (the initials of the term "Old Portrait"). Sometimes he called him thus; sometimes, when in an especially ironical mood, by the full title. He had known the physician from boyhood.

"Wie gehts, Old Portrait?" he greeted him this morning from the vantage of the easy chair. "The tender passion still unroused? When are we to have some little new portraits for your family picture gallery?"

Bellamy took these pleasantries urbanely, though he was aware of a certain savagery underneath them. He understood Chesney's character fairly well, and felt rather sorry for him in his present predicament. It was rather like seeing a trapped lion. Even though the lion had been indulging in man-eating, he still felt compassion for the great, baffled brute-force. His confirmed bachelorhood had always been the subject of more or less caustic jesting on Chesney's part. In an evil mood, he seemed to enjoy nothing better than baiting his brother and Bellamy, turn and turn about.

Bellamy was a Baliol man and so was Gerald. Cecil used to say that Baliol bred what Byron called "excellent persons of the third-sex." He used to harangue the two celibates rather brilliantly on the subject of sex in mind—quoting Mommson and other authorities to prove that "genius is in proportion to passion."

But Bellamy was an able man in his way. He had studied medicine in Edinburgh and Vienna. He was far better posted than his London confrère, Hopkins, on the vagaries of the morphia habit. Besides, Lady Wychcote had had a talk with him in her private sitting-room before sending him upstairs. Now as he sat, parrying Cecil's rather ill-tempered thrusts with imperturbable good-humour, he was watching him narrowly out of his large, vague looking eyes, though he seemed casual enough. He saw clearly that Cecil was getting more morphia than Gaynor's record showed. He had decided, before talking to him for twenty minutes, that a trained nurse was indispensable—one, moreover, who had been on such cases before, and had nerve and character. Hopkins had not engaged a nurse because the only one of whom he knew, perfectly suited for the purpose, had still ten days on a similar case before she would be free. In his pocket Bellamy had the address of this nurse—Anne Harding—Hopkins had sent it to him the day before. She would be free to accept another engagement on the twelfth—that was to-morrow.

He determined, with Mrs. Chesney's and Lady Wychcote's approval, to wire her that afternoon.

However, Bellamy made a serious mistake in not speaking openly to Chesney about his intention of sending for the nurse. Sophy had to break this news to him, and he received it with a burst of appalling fury against the doctor.

"Damned little sneak!" he cried, his face convulsed. "Why the devil didn't he say so to me?" His language became so outrageous that Sophy rose, saying:

"I must leave you, if you talk like this."

Something in her white face—a sort of smothered loathing—checked him.

"See here," he said, mastering himself by a violent effort—a vein in the middle of his forehead stood out dark and purplish; "now just try to take this in, all of you—my well-wishers. To do anything with me whatever, you've got to be straight with me, by God! I'll not have sneaking, and confabulations in dark corners. And make that little eunuch Bellamy understand it, or I'll pitch him out of window, neck and crop, the next time he sets foot in this house!"

Sophy felt that he was to a certain extent justified in his anger. She promised for Bellamy that he would say things directly to Cecil himself in future.

Then she went away to the nursery for solace, sick at heart, sick at brain, sick in spirit.

To her amazement she found Lady Wychcote there, seated in a chair before the fire with Bobby on her knee. He was babbling excitedly, and his grandmother was smiling at him with that appraising look in her eyes which Sophy so resented. The boy tried to snap his soft, curled fingers at his mother as soon as he caught sight of her, in his eagerness to have her come near.

"Muvvah!" he cried. "Oh, Muvvah! Ganny div Bobby gee-gee!"

"Yes. I'm going to give him a Shelty," said Lady Wychcote. "It's high time the boy learned how to ride."

"It's very good of you," said Sophy, pleased for the child's delight. "But he's only two, you know."

"Quite old enough," Lady Wychcote said firmly. "I wonder you never thought of it yourself."

"We couldn't have afforded it in town," Sophy said with some stiffness. Her mother-in-law's tone was supercilious.

"Pf!" said Lady Wychcote. "You know Gerald has a faible for you. You'd only to hint it."

Sophy reddened.

"I don't hint for things," she said still more stiffly.

"Well, well! Don't let's tiff over it," Lady Wychcote retorted loftily. "We're not congenial, but I've taken a fancy to my grandson. Let that mollify you."

Sophy gazed out at the bleared landscape, that looked wavy like a bad print thus seen through the streaming window-pane. She realised in that moment that unhappiness filled her to the least crevice of her being. She needed kindness so bitterly, and here as her only companion was this frigid, acrid woman who disliked her for having married Cecil, and grudged her Gerald's friendship. Then she glanced back at the familiar group before the fire. Bobby was leaning forward against the beautifully corseted figure of his grandparent, eagerly demanding to know more about his "gee-gee."

A terror seized Sophy—a sort of blind fear. Was this the beginning of a new misery? Would Lady Wychcote try to get her son from her? Was she laying plans behind that smooth, narrow brow? Insidiously, little by little, as the dreary years crept by, would she try to wean Bobby from her, influence him against her? Did she lust for him to make of him what she had failed to make of Cecil and Gerald? She felt as if she must snatch Bobby from that well-preserved breast, and run to hide with him in the nethermost parts of the earth. It was a feeling stronger than reason, one of those presentiments which seized her sometimes—which so often came true. A powerful, eerie feeling of knowing without being able to say why—like the knowledge that had come to her when she told Olive Arundel that she would meet Amaldi in a room with three windows. Then she shook the feeling off. The very instance that she had recalled calmed her. There had been three windows, true. But evidently Amaldi was to play no important part in her life. She might not see him for years, if ever. Olive had told her that he was returning to Italy in July.

Miller came to give Bobby his luncheon and the two ladies left the nursery together. As they passed through the baize door that shut the corridor leading to the nursery from the rest of the house, Lady Wychcote said, "Come to my room a moment, please. I've something to show you that may interest you."

She unlocked a little ivory box on her dressing-table and took out a miniature, framed as a locket. "My father, when he was a child," she said briefly. "Do you see the likeness?"

Sophy gazed down at the miniature, and the dark fear stole over her again. It was certainly strangely like her Bobby. The same dark-red curls, and imperious little cleft chin. The eyes in the miniature were brown, Bobby's were grey—that was the most noticeable difference.

"Yes—it's very like Bobby," she said with an effort.

"My father was Chancellor of the Exchequer at seven-and-thirty," said Lady Wychcote. "You see now the chief reason of my interest in my grandson."

Sophy saw indeed. Then she gathered up her courage.

"But it's a pity, I think, to count on the tendencies of such a mite," she said. "He may not show the least inclination for politics."

"That," said Lady Wychcote rather grimly, "is a matter of education."

Sophy looked into the hard eyes.

"I think not," she said, but her tone was gentle.

"Allow me—as one having more experience—to disagree with you," replied her mother-in-law.

Sophy still looked at her.

"You forget one thing," she said finally, "the fact that he probably inherits something of my nature. I have to a hopeless degree what is called the artistic temperament."

Locking away the miniature again, Lady Wychcote permitted herself a sourire fin. "It would not have annoyed you had you been my daughter," was what she said.

It was useless to bicker with her. Sophy merely changed the subject by giving her an account of Cecil's indignation over Bellamy's lack of directness with him. Lady Wychcote, who could be reasonable enough when she wished, agreed to speak with Bellamy herself on the subject.

The next day, by the first morning train, Anne Harding arrived at Dynehurst. She was a small, slight but wiry woman of about thirty-five, and her curly black hair was still short, having been cropped some months previous during an attack of typhoid. This short, curling hair and a smile of singular ingenuousness, gave her an almost childlike air at times. Sophy, as she took in the nurse's appearance, wondered where in that small body lurked the courage and determination necessary for such a profession. She wondered how Nurse Harding would strike Cecil. Would he take one of his rough-and-ready fancies to her, or detest her from the first. She talked plainly and quietly to her. When she had finished, she said:

"How do you think it will be best for you to meet Mr. Chesney, Nurse? Shall I tell him that you are here first? Shall I go in with you?"

Anne Harding consulted the little watch in its leather bracelet on her thin, sinewy dark wrist. She had black eyes full of fire and subdued laughter. Sophy realised suddenly that she looked something like the pictures of Hall Caine as a young man—and incidentally that she also resembled a very alert, large-eyed insect of some sort. This made her smile. Anne Harding, catching the glimmer of this smile as she looked up from her watch, thought:

"What a perfectly lovely woman! Of course a woman like this had to go and marry a morphinomaniac."

Then she asked practically, before herself answering Sophy's question:

"How does Mr. Chesney take his nourishment? Every two hours?"

"Oh, no," said Sophy, astonished. "He has meals when we do—all except breakfast. Why? Should he eat every two hours?"

"It depends, of course, on the doctor's orders," said Anne cautiously. "But has he an appetite? The drug kills the appetite as a rule."

"Well—I don't think he does eat much."

"You see," explained the nurse, "I was thinking that I might take his tray in—as soon as I'd changed to my uniform and cap. A simple way like that would be the best."

Sophy rose.

"Oh, I forgot——" she said.

"It won't take me fifteen minutes," said Anne cheerfully. "That's my box now, I fancy."

The small black box was brought in, and Sophy left her to change her dress.

Bellamy was due in half an hour now. She went to report her impression of the nurse to Lady Wychcote, who had asked her to do so. She was still in her bedroom being made up for the day by her French maid. Louise was dismissed and Sophy sketched a little picture of the nurse for her mother-in-law. Lady Wychcote was dissatisfied that Anne Harding was so small.

"However," she said on second thoughts, "those eft-like creatures have the sharpest brains sometimes. Perhaps it's just as well."

Sophy, looking at her "morning face," realised that she was using less rouge than usual, though she always used it with discretion. To-day she was almost pale. This harmonising of her complexion with the circumstance struck Sophy as drearily droll.

A servant knocked at the door to say that Dr. Bellamy had come. They sent word to Nurse Harding, and went down together.

It was still raining.

XXII

"Please don't look so frightened," said Anne kindly. "It's just the usual worries in a case like this. I've talked with Dr. Bellamy already; but I must have your help."

"Go on, please," said Sophy.

Anne took up the poker, and began breaking the big lump of coal in the grate as she said this. Little spirals of greenish-yellow smoke escaped from the cracks made by the poker, then jetted into flame. She was so sorry for this beautiful, scared woman, that she looked doggedly at the lump of coal all the time that she was speaking.

"It's just that Mr. Chesney is getting extra morphia—I mean taking it himself—lots of it——" she began bluntly.

"Oh!" cried Sophy. It was a sort of gasp. Then she said hurriedly: "But it's impossible, nurse. How can he get it? Gaynor, his valet, and I had all there is. Now we've turned it over to you—with both the syringes."

"He's getting it, ma'am," said Anne firmly. "And he's taking it hypodermically, too."

"Oh, don't you think you are mistaken?"

"No, Mrs. Chesney. I couldn't be."

"But—but—— Have you——"

She could not bring it out. She could not ask this little stranger woman whether she had searched Cecil's things for the stuff—for another syringe.

"Yes, I've hunted—thoroughly—through everything," Anne said quite as a matter of course, guessing what she had meant to ask. "He sleeps so heavily, when he does sleep—from the accumulated effects, you know—that I've even been able to feel between the mattresses. I've searched the edges for a rip where he might have stuffed it inside. I've looked through everything—but his letter-box."

She shattered the lump of coal quite as she said this.

"That's why I've come to you. He's in one of those heavy sleeps. I've got the letter-box and the key in my room. I want you to open it and look for me. I didn't quite like to do that."

Sophy gulped shame. Its tang was bitterer than wormwood. Then she felt a sudden anger against this cool, white-capped little creature who summoned her suddenly to violate her husband's private property.

"No. I can't do that, Nurse," she said coldly. "Not on an uncertainty."

"But it's quite certain," said Anne Harding patiently. "Wait— I'll prove it to you."

She turned at last and looked at Sophy.

"In order to be quite sure," she said—"you know, ma'am, Dr. Bellamy had told me he felt pretty sure that Mr. Chesney was getting more than the chart showed. Well, to be quite sure, I substituted salt and water for four out of the six doses I've given in twenty-four hours. Now you see, ma'am, to cut a patient down suddenly in the doses like that would make him suffer something awful if he was really not getting more himself."

Sophy sat gazing at her.

"How would it make him suffer?" she said at last. Her voice was almost a whisper.

"Oh, nerves—terrible—we've no way of imagining what they go through when the drug's taken away sudden. I nursed a case once where the doctor had that method. But I'd never do it again, ma'am. The patient twisted the bars at the foot of the bed in his agony like they had been paper. It was a brass bed. No, ma'am. I'd never be party to a thing like that again."

Sophy felt as if she were ill herself.

"Don't!" she said. She put up her hand over her face, as she leaned sick and weak in her chair. "Don't tell me things like that—please."

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Chesney," said the nurse in her kind, blunt way. "But you see I had to prove my point to you. It's a most important one. That box must be searched, ma'am. And you see I don't like to go into Mr. Chesney's private papers. Now you, as his wife, can do it without its being any harm. Wait a minute, though—are you sure of this man, Gaynor?"

"Absolutely."

"It's very hard to be sure of people in a morphia case, Mrs. Chesney. Sometimes just pity makes 'em give the drug to the patient."

"I am quite sure of Gaynor. I'll tell you why," Sophy added, feeling that it was due the nurse to do so. And she told her of the part that Gaynor had played in the tragic story.

"Well, I should say he's safe then," admitted Anne, when Sophy had finished. "And now that I feel sure of that, won't you let me bring you that box, Mrs. Chesney? You want to save Mr. Chesney, and that's the only way to do it—to help me and the doctor," she added shrewdly.

Sophy could scarcely have grown paler than she was.

"Go ... bring it...." she said in a faint voice.

Anne brought the red morocco box, with C. G. C. stamped on it in worn gold letters, and handed it with the key to Sophy.

As the nurse set the box upon her knees, Sophy looked so ghastly that Anne exclaimed:

"Oh, pray, pray, Mrs. Chesney, don't take it so hard! It's for his good we're doing it—to save him."

"Yes," said Sophy.

With a firm gesture she thrust the key suddenly into the small spring-lock and turned it. As she felt the lid rise beneath her hand, it seemed to her as though she had by this act shared his degradation—drawn part of it into her own blood. With her slender, nobly shaped hands she began to search among the letters and documents.—Nothing. The colour began to rise again into her white face. Eagerly she turned the contents out upon her lap. Nothing. Nothing.

"You see!" she cried, her tone was almost joyous. "There's nothing of the kind—you were mistaken! There's nothing—nothing!"

Anne frowned. Then she said soberly:

"Well, I've got to find it—somehow. It's wonderful their cleverness at hiding the stuff."

"But, Nurse Harding," said Sophy reproachfully, that vivid colour still in her face, "a hypodermic syringe-case isn't a thing that can be hidden away easily. You've told me that you've looked everywhere. Isn't it rather cruel to be suspicious to this extent?"

"Mrs. Chesney," said Anne Harding, her black eyes like little gems with hard, cruelly-kind astuteness. "If the angel Gabriel was given me for a morphia patient, I'd pluck his wings—for fear he'd hide the nasty stuff among the feathers!"

She was a character, was Anne Harding, so utterly unlike any English nurse that Sophy had ever seen before, that she wondered whether indeed she could really be English. Anne was very quick at following the probabilities of thought-sequence, for she smiled suddenly her childish smile, that contrasted so oddly with the almost elf-like shrewdness of her eyes, and said:

"Pray forgive my speaking that way. I come from the Bush, you know. I'm an Australian. We've a blunt sort of way of speaking out there."

Chesney was quite amiable with the little nurse. He knew of course that she suspected him, but the very fact that he had so entirely outwitted her made him feel a sort of grim pleasure in her presence.

"She's a good little rat," he said to Sophy. "Not over-burdened with brains, though."

And he smiled his secretive smile.

"Give me just one week longer, Doctor Bellamy, and I'll find it— I'll find it or give up nursing!" Anne Harding pleaded. But Bellamy determined to speak with frankness to Chesney himself. He went to his room that day and said without preliminary ado:

"Chesney, for your own sake I'm going to take the liberty of being brutally frank. What I think you're doing is only a regular symptom of your ailment. Here goes, then: Haven't you another hypodermic and morphia in your possession?"

Chesney eyed him cruelly.

"It's a queer profession—yours," he said. "It gives a little chap like you courage to insult a big man—just because he happens to be ill and therefore weak, for the moment."

Bellamy looked at him without changing countenance.

"I was afraid you'd take it this way— I wish you wouldn't. The very way you're acting now is a symptom."

"You don't seem able to remove these symptoms," said Chesney, with his slight, mocking grin.

"I can't—unless you help me. It's in your own hands, you know. You've always reminded me of a lion, Chesney. Now you make me think of a lion that gnaws off its own paw to get out of a trap."

"On the contrary," said Cecil, laughing that silent laugh of his, "I'm in fine fighting trim, I assure you. Wait—here's a bit of verse on the subject:

"'The lion and the eunuch were fighting for a prize,
The lion beat the eunuch, for all he was so wise.'"

Bellamy looked at him with undiminished composure.

"Ah, Chesney—you're in a bad way," he said regretfully.

"What the hell do you mean by that?" demanded Cecil, flaring up.

"You try to insult the man who's trying to help you," replied Bellamy. "But an ill man can't insult a physician. Good-morning."

And he went away.

Three days passed. Chesney was very reasonable for him. Drank the "slops" that were served him without demur—went for drives when the weather permitted. The days were murky with ravelled cloud held up in a network of pale sunshine. Nearly every afternoon and in the night fine showers came hissing on the leaves and over the roof of Dynehurst. He read a great deal. He had given up his heavy political reading, and begun a course of Wilkie Collins.

"It's odd how illness makes a chap take to trash in literature," he said to Sophy, whose eyes he saw wondering over the title of the book he had put down when she came in. "It's as if the mind got weak, too, and needed slops like the body."

But this odd deterioration in taste was due to the morphia, which at times gave such a deliciously false sense of interest in the most trivial things. Deep, serious thinking was impossible under its disintegrating glamour. It gave rather gay, fleeting fantasies—a sense of delicate mental power as though thought were a sort of glittering toy, to amuse oneself with. After Wilkie Collins he took up the French detective novels—then shifted to "Ouida." These works filled him with glee. "Crewel-work Ruskin," he called them. "But damned amusing for all that. She dips her coat-of-many-colours in her brother's blood every now and then. She might have been great," he declared, "if she hadn't had hæmorrhages of the imagination. That made her mind anæmic—but she could spin darned good yarns, by Jove!"

He was much amused by his mother's sudden interest in Bobby.

"The Mater's vaulting ambition has gone clean over my head and landed on Bobkins," he told Sophy, chuckling. "I bet she'll live to ninety-and-nine, just for the pleasure of speaking of 'my grandson, the Prime Minister.'"

He took to calling Bobby "Little William Pitt."

"Come here, little William Pitt; you're going to be It, as they say in the States," he would say when the child was brought in to see him. "I hope you'll approve of me for a father when you're in office."

This strange name by which his father called him confused the child and displeased him. He felt that he was being made fun of. Children and dogs dislike the people who laugh at them. He hated to go into his father's room, and resisted so strenuously that Sophy took him there less and less.

As the days went by, and still Anne Harding had not found any morphia or hypodermic syringe in Cecil's possession, Sophy began to grow more hopeful. Cecil was certainly far quieter than he had been for some time. She began again to think that Bellamy and the nurse must surely be mistaken.

On the afternoon of the fourth day she called Anne into her room, and spoke to her about it.

"Don't you think you must be mistaken, this time, Nurse?" she asked eagerly.

Anne Harding shook her stubborn, wise little head.

"No, Mrs. Chesney," she said.

"But where could it be? Mr. Chesney is never long enough anywhere but in his own room to have it hidden about the house."

"It isn't hidden about the house," said Anne. "It's hidden in his own room. I know it—as if I'd seen it through the wall, or floor, or wherever it is," she added firmly, seeing Sophy's look of doubt. But this doubt could not withstand such authoritative conviction. Sophy sighed wearily.

"I suppose you must be right," she said; "but it seems impossible."

She sat looking out of window at the waving mantle of rain which was again blown grey and wild over the swelling breasts of pasture land. Then she turned vehemently.

"Think of it!" she exclaimed. "The beauty of a field of poppies! The passionate loveliness of all those scarlet cups full of sunlight. And all the while their hearts are bitter with this evil—this horrible poison! Oh, why don't men wipe them from the earth!"

Anne looked at her with that wise kindliness. "You forget all the good that opium does," she said brusquely tender, after her fashion. "It's like so many other things—this fire on your hearth for instance. A good servant but a bad master."

Just after this conversation Sophy went to read aloud to Cecil at his request. This also was a new phase. He could never endure reading aloud in former days. Now he would lie, dozing off now and then, evidently soothed agreeably by the sound of her low, rich voice.

The weather had turned raw and chilly again with the renewed rain. Sophy shivered suddenly as she sat reading. Anne Harding, who was tidying a little medicine chest on a table near by, noticed this.

"Can't I fetch you a shawl, Mrs. Chesney?" she asked, looking up with her alert black eyes.

"Thanks; but wouldn't you like a fire lit, Cecil?" Sophy asked. "You're so fond of a fire in your bedroom. I can't think why Gaynor hasn't seen to it."

"I don't care for a fire," said Chesney curtly. "Being in bed is stuffy work as it is."

He lay nearly always in bed now.

"But, Cecil, you're so used to it. I'm afraid being in a damp room like this may give you cold. It isn't as if you were accustomed to doing without fire. Please let Nurse——"

"Don't nag!" he said, quite roughly this time. "I can look after my own wants. I'm not quite incompetent yet."

Sophy glanced at the nurse, still anxious. She thought Anne Harding's eyes had a rather queer expression—startled.

"Don't you agree with me, Nurse?" she asked.

Anne lowered her eyes and busied herself again with the little chest.

"I don't think it matters," she said, "if Mr. Chesney really prefers it this way."

"Do get on with your reading, Sophy," broke in Cecil impatiently.

Sophy took up the book again, and Anne Harding went to Tilda for a scarf, which she returned with and put over Sophy's shoulders.

As she left the room, finally this time, she glanced keenly at the empty fireplace. She thought she had a clue.

XXIII

With a brisk movement of satisfaction, the nurse now drew a black, oblong object from the pocket of her dressing-gown, and going swiftly over to the fireplace, put the fender noiselessly aside, and knelt down on the hearth. She was sure, quite sure now, as sure as one could be of anything theoretically divined, that the hypodermic syringe and morphia were concealed somewhere in that chimney-place. She had looked there before, but not in the exhaustive way that she meant to look now. She had even felt along the shelf of the chimney-throat with her hands, but there had been nothing. Now, inch by inch, like a little Miss Sherlock Holmes, she meant to examine that cold, sooty cavity. The black tube in her hand was a small electric pocket-light, such as had just come in about that time. When she had looked before, she had used her bedroom candle. Now she meant to turn that bright, electric gleam on every inch of the brickwork and metal. Slowly she drew the pencil of light from side to side, lying flat, and beginning her search under the bars of the grate; then, crouching, she directed the ray higher, towards the bend of the chimney-throat, feeling, tapping, with her free hand as she did so. A fire had evidently been made there recently, probably on the day of Chesney's arrival; for, though the grate had been freshly polished only that morning and the housemaid's broom had swept the back of the chimney, yet a slight fluff of soot clung to it higher up. Anne touched this soot, pressing down her fingers firmly, delicately, feeling for some crevice, some loose bit of brick or iron. All was firm and cold. She sat back on her heels, disappointed. She looked—crouching there in her grey wrapper, with the short, black curls framing her thin, baffled little face—like some determined child who had decided to watch and surprise Santa Claus in his descent from the roof—and who had watched in vain. Then suddenly she knelt up again. Something had caught her clever eyes. She noticed—and at this, the well-regulated little timepiece of her heart began to tick hurriedly—yes, she had noticed that in one corner of the chimney-throat there was a broad, smooth place where the soot was quite worn away. The dark-red fire-brick showed plainly through. Anne passed the bright glow of light across this smooth patch very slowly. No; the bricks were not loose here. She held the light closer, gazing with eyes narrowed to the utmost intensity of vision. There was a little spot, or excrescence, on the brick near the seam of the corner. She had felt it with her finger-tips as she drew them lightly back and forth. She had thought this roughness merely a defect in one of the bricks. Now she touched it again—scraped it with her nail. Her nail made no sound against it. Then she pressed upon it. The nail sank in. It was perhaps a bit of putty left by the work-men. But then putty isn't used for building fireplaces; besides, the fire would have melted it long ago——

She began to feel all around it. Suddenly something in the angle, in the seam where the chimney-throat squared, caught her eye. It looked like a bit of black wire. She picked at it with her nail, and it yielded—like the string of a tightly strung guitar. All at once it flashed over the little detective. That rough lump was wax; it fixed the end of this black string in place. The string was taut, because it was held so—held by a weight at the other end probably. Anne did not know anything about the construction of chimney-throats—had she done so, the solution would have come to her sooner. But she guessed now that there must be a hollow behind the brickwork that faced her. She slid her hand up and forward. Yes, there was an empty space behind—the usual air-chamber in all well-built chimneys of which she had not known. Ah, now she had it! Carefully, very daintily, little by little, she began to pull up the fine black silk cord which, as she had guessed, passed from where its end was fixed in place by that lump of wax or putty down the back of the chimney-throat. It answered readily. She felt the weight on its other end scraping against the wall as she drew it up. In another moment she had it in her hand—a little parcel, wrapped in oiled paper. As she broke open the paper and looked down at the object in her hand, her face was a study of elfish triumph and unwilling admiration.

"What couldn't they do to the world, if they were as hideously clever at everything else as they are at hiding this stuff!" thought Anne Harding, referring to the tribe of morphinomaniacs as known to her experience.

She set the fender back, and getting stiffly to her feet, cramped by nearly an hour's crouching, returned to her own room and locked the just-found hypodermic case safely away in the bottom of her travelling-box.

By five o'clock next morning Anne was fully dressed, capped, and aproned. She made herself a cup of strong black tea over her little spirit lamp, nibbled two biscuits, and, glancing at her bracelet-watch, went out with her light, quick step. She passed Chesney's door and entered the dressing-room. Gaynor, who slept as lightly as a cat, started wide awake when the nurse entered. He drew the bedclothes to his chin, feeling with his other hand for his dressing-gown which lay on a chair near by. He could never get used to the unceremonious entrances of this little stranger woman into his bedroom. She came to him, her finger against her lips, bent down, and whispered:

"I've found the morphia and the syringe Mr. Chesney has been hiding, Gaynor. I'm going to tell him of it myself. He'll be rousing about now. No matter what you hear, don't get frightened. I'm going to lock his door inside and put the key in my pocket. Don't try to interfere—will you? Don't come to the door or answer, even if he calls you?"

Gaynor had flushed deeply on hearing of his master's detected falsehood. Now he turned pale. "Ain't you afraid, Miss?" he asked. He was always punctiliously civil to the nurse. He felt that it would not be respectful for one in his position to call her "Nurse"—the little woman who was trying to save his master. He had a sense of gratitude and of fitness rare, not only in a servant.

"No!" Anne whispered vigorously. "No; I'm not a bit afraid. I've had much worse cases than this. I'll manage him."

"He's a gentleman with a very high spirit, Miss."

"I'm not afraid of his high spirit. Maybe it won't be so high when I'm through with him. I'm an Australian, you know, Gaynor. I don't think Australians are as afraid of their menfolk as Englishwomen. You must keep quiet till I'm through. That's all."

She turned and went out, passing through the connecting door into Chesney's bedroom. She locked the door as she had said, pocketing the key. Shrewdly she glanced at the still sleeping man. He had been asleep for ten hours now. She knew that at the stage of morphinomania that he had reached the effect of a dose lasted only about four hours when the victim of the habit was awake, though the heavy, drugged sleep resulting from it might drag on for some hours after. The least sound or touch was sufficient to rouse him now. After lighting the coffee machine, she decided to open the shutters. The cold, raw daylight would have a wholesomely chilling effect, should he show a tendency to become violent. Braver than many soldiers, the little nurse went from one window to the other of the large bedroom, throwing wide the shutters and fastening them back. A gale was whipping the great boughs of the trees, the rain blew in upon her, spotting the bosom of her dress and her fresh apron-bib and cap. It was like a bleak September day, and it seemed strange to see green leaves instead of yellow ones flying through the air.

"And this is June. What a beastly climate!" thought the little Australian.

Then she turned, drying her face and hands with her handkerchief. As she expected, Chesney was watching her from his pillow. His face, grey with morphia and glistening like wet clay with the odious sweat that follows on an exhausted dose, looked more deathly than a corpse's clear, waxen mask.

"What o'clock is it?" he asked, speaking thickly with his pasty tongue and dried lips.

"Ten after five," said Anne Harding briskly. "You'll be wanting a cup of coffee, I fancy, sir."

"Isn't it time for ... for the ... er ... usual ... thing, yet?" He could never bring himself, in these moments of weakness and horrible, faint desire, to name the drug plainly.

"Your allowance of morphia?"

Anne did not mean to spare him. She glanced down at her bracelet. How Chesney hated that tyrannical watch on the nurse's thin wrist! It seemed like some horrible wen, or tumour, to him. Until she had fussed over him and gone he could not get the stuff out of the chimney-place—the stuff which was now simply and literally life to him.

"Not due for twenty minutes yet, sir," she said cheerfully, glancing up again. "But I'll just bathe your face and hands and bring you the coffee. It'll be ready by then. I'll tidy you a bit, sir, then fetch it."

There was nothing for it but submission. Sometimes, on these occasions, Chesney ran over in his mind horrid ways in which he would "pay back" this little woman for the misery she made him endure in such moments, should he ever get her wholly in his power.

She "tidied" him deftly, plumped up his pillows as he liked them, and fetched the coffee. When he had drunk it (black and strong Anne made it, and let him have it without insisting on cream or sugar—she had her compassions for these poor, mad-willed beings), she lifted the tray from the bed, and, glancing at her watch again, drew up a chair and sat down facing him.

"Ten minutes yet, sir, to wait," she said. "And I've something I want to say to you."

"Well, say it, then," said Chesney drily. He was too weak just then to feel fury, but what he felt resembled it as furious action in a nightmare sometimes resembles real action—as when, for instance, one tries to swim after an enemy and finds that one is cleaving one's way through thick, clogging waves of treacle.

Anne looked straight at him.

"It's this," she said: "I want to tell you myself that I've found your extra hypodermic and supply of morphia."

She rose as she said this and stood on her guard. Chesney stared blankly for a second; then he gave a sort of animal outcry, and half sprang from the bed.

"Steady, Mr. Chesney!" called the nurse, sharp and clear. "I'm not afraid of you!"

Chesney sat, with half-suffocated, soblike sounds breaking from his great, naked, hairy chest. His hands clenched and unclenched. The bedclothes half torn from the bed by his sliding bound were tangled about his feet.

He gasped out the words—spat them at her:

"You little civet-cat. You damned little skunk! You——"

He could not articulate. His teeth ground together. He half rose, as though to leap on her.

"Keep still!" said she, in a fierce, low little voice. "You're not ready for murder—yet—I hope. Nor you've not sunk low enough to strike a woman——"

"Strike you! You little b——h, I could break you in bits with my bare hands!"

They stayed glaring at each other. It was the glare that a huge dog and a dauntless little cat exchange when death is in the air. Then Anne spoke:

"Be a man ... for Gawd's sake ... pretend to be a man!" she said.

Chesney blinked and gasped with fury and weakness, as though she had spat in his face.

Anne followed it up.

"Look here," said she; "I'm trying with all my might to save you from hell ... yes, hell, sir!" She pounded her little brown fist against her other palm. "And you want to kill me for it. But I'm stronger than you are. Yes, I am! For why? For why my nerves ain't rotten with that filthy poison you love like mother's milk. And I'm going to save you whether you will or no! God or the devil helping me—I don't much care which—I'm going to save you! You hear that?"

She went closer to him—a little, furious figure, quivering with righteous rage.

"D'you think I'm afraid of you? Not much I ain't! Just look at me and tell me what you think about it."

Chesney sat hypnotised. Here was the Mongoose to his Serpent with a vengeance. Something began to rise slowly up in him—something clear and clean rising from the dregs of his stupefied better nature. It was that unwilling meed of admiration that the conquered pay to a courageous foe. Suddenly he laughed. It was a shocking sight and sound, this hoarse, weak laughter issuing from that grey, sweating face.

"By God! You little Bush-Ranger, you've got guts!" he gasped.

Anne was changed, as St. Paul says the redeemed will be changed, in the twinkling of an eye. It was the psychological moment. It came differently to different patients, and she arrived at it by varying methods, but it always came when Nurse Harding was on a case.

Her rigid figure relaxed, her little face softened with her childlike smile.

"See here. I'm your friend," she said. "Your friend, man; not your enemy. Now you just 'fess up, as the children say. Tell me really how much of the stuff you're in the habit of taking, and I'll make you comfy with a dose in proportion, right away—this very minute. I won't wait for doctor's orders or anything. Will you tell me? Eh?"

Her voice was too pretty for words, thus wheedling and coaxing the huge man. So might Jenny Wren chuck and chirp to some big Cuckoo-bastard, to venture from the nest that her kind step-motherhood had provided.

Chesney was at that point in the fight when even a great lad will sob sometimes from sheer rage and exhaustion. He sank back, pulling up the sheet about his face so as to hide it from her.

Anne slipped the hypodermic case from her pocket, opened it, and went over beside him.

"Now, then ... now, then," she coaxed, like some one gentling a fractious horse. "See—here's the blessed, devilish old stuff. I know how you're craving it—damn it for a nasty half-breed of saint and fiend! It's here—right here in my hand. Only tell me—the truth—about how much you've been giving yourself, and I swear to you as I'm an honest human, I'll give you enough to ease you."