d again held in escape softly, little by
little from her bosom which was pressed against the bedclothes. She was
still kneeling where he had dragged her forward. It was an attitude of
prayer. Her whole body seemed to beseech him. Yet, though he saw this,
he was not moved by it, except to extra caution. She could not speak at
once, so he spoke again himself. Each word that he uttered calmed him.
The naturalness of his assumed tone reassured him as it fell upon his
own ear. As he would have said of another, he was "doing it damned
well."

"I hope, since you adopted such radical measures," he remarked coldly,
"that you at least chose a decent specimen. Was it by any chance my
mother's little medical poodle!"

"No--Cecil. Doctor Hopkins came afterwards, but----"

"What? you had two of those vermin in my house yesterday?"

There was rage in his eyes again. Quickly he veiled them.

"This is a bit overwhelming, you must admit," he said in a tired voice.
Then he asked: "Who was the other luminary of hypocrisy?"

"It was Doctor Carfew, Cecil--Algernon Carfew."

Chesney's worst fears were realised. If this man had seen him, he
_knew_. A dark, smothering fear rushed over him--he was a brave man, but
this vague, shadowy yet poignant terror seemed to turn his very vitals
to water. He was as afraid of the fancied image of this accursedly
knowing physician as a condemned lout of the headsman. It seemed to him,
lying there, a strong man, master of his own house, the free-born
citizen of a great Empire, that he was yet but a little doll of pith in
the clutches of this grim, devilishly well-informed scientist. The
medical profession took suddenly a symbolic form in his mind--it bulked
before him like a huge, black Octopus heaving up from that shadowy sea
of dread in which he was sinking. One of the vast tentacles had gripped
him--was dragging him down--down. It was with amazement that he heard
his own voice demanding in icy composure:

"And the verdict of this learned gentleman?"

He had closed his eyes again as though bored and wearied by the subject.
He felt one of Sophy's soft, bare arms go round his neck. Her hair
brushed his lips as she laid her head upon his breast. Her face was
hidden from him. He heard her impassioned whisper:

"Cecil--don't, don't shut me out! Let me share it, I know-- I _know_!"

XVIII

The moods of a morphinomaniac are very inconsistent. There were times
when Cecil Chesney agonised over t