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
haemorrhages of the imagination. That made her mind anaemic--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,