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

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

XXI

The next day the rain was coming down in swirls. A strong wind drove it.
It beat against the window-pane like little fingers drumming with sharp
nails. Down the chimneys it beat, spattering into the fires which were
kindled everywhere. The Park was a grey-green clustered shadow. The
lawns looked soggy like moss. The huge house was gloomy as a decorated
cave. The furniture and stair-rail sweated with moisture.

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 an