ke liberties with _me_, ill or well," Anne
Harding had replied, red with anger. "You treat me with proper respect,
or I'll go back to London by the next train. Suit yourself."

She wouldn't talk or jest with him for the rest of that day, but by the
next morning she seemed to have regained her usual cool poise, and
remarked, as she served his early cup of cocoa:

"I surmise from your pretty behaviour that you've decided to keep me and
your self-respect."

"Thou hast said, O Bush-Bully," replied he gravely. "I'll even address
your Bullyship in the third person if it be required."

"Oh, no! There's no need of _that_ much distance between us, my
pretty-spoken gentleman!" came the tart rejoinder. "'Hands off!' is my
motto. Just so you remember that I live up to it, and your part is to
live up to it, too, while I'm with you--I'm hunky-dory."

"Does that mean 'cheeky' in your native lingo?" grinned Chesney. She was
giving him his morning dose (one-seventh to-day) as he spoke; so for the
time being he liked her again.

"No, Mr. Smart," said Anne. "It's United States for 'all right.'"

Thus they chaffed amicably when she had just given him his allowance of
morphia, or during the first hour after; but as the effects gradually
wore off--which they did rapidly, the doses being so reduced by now--his
mood changed. As he felt that stark, indescribable _malaise_ stealing
over him--that horrid unearthly suffering which is not nausea, or acute
pain, or the hot ache of fever, or the shivered ice of chills, but
something more subtle, more deathly, as it were an illness drifted down
from another darker, crueller, more demoniacal planet than the earth--as
there crept through him this nameless, terrible, hideously fatiguing
feeling that seemed to rack the finer substance of a body within his
body--to strain and fray these more delicate fibres of being, until the
torture was far more horrible than if it had been the brutal work-a-day
anguish of a fractured bone, or the frank throes of cholera--when these
hours were upon him, then he hated the little nurse. He hated her quiet,
practical composure as she sat crocheting near the window, or reading
aloud to him words that had no meaning--hated her for sitting there calm
and healthy--while the discomfort arising from the lack of the usual
poison surged into billows of physical distress that flowed over him,
one upon another, as he lay sweating, tossing on what seemed the oozy
bed of an ocea