waiting for Hopkins to come
and go were very painful. Sometimes the little doctor would be half an
hour late, and each minute of this half hour seemed endless to the man,
fretting with crawling skin and muscles spasmodically twitching, for the
calming poison. So when Hopkins felt his forehead and his pulse on these
occasions, he would find the one moist and the other feeble. These
symptoms were in accord with the therapeutics of the case, hence the
inexperienced doctor's satisfaction.

But though Sophy felt saddened by the way that Cecil seemed to keep her
civilly aloof, as though what he was enduring were impossible of
comprehension to her, on the other hand she was very happy in her
surprise that this dreadful and mysterious habit should prove so easy to
cure. She recalled De Quincy's _Confessions of an Opium Eater_, and the
agonies that he described as accompanying his efforts to abstain.
Morphia, then, must differ in its effects from opium. She thanked God,
in her ignorance, that Cecil's enemy was morphia and not opium.

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