n of _malaise_. He hated her so that he imagined breaking
her to bits with his bare hands, as he had once threatened her. He could
feel her little hard, pointed chin denting the hollow of his gripped
hand, as he held her thin body between his knees, and pressed her head
backwards till the spine snapped. He imagined her naked in his grasp--a
little dark, lean, pitifully ugly body--and he was beating her with a
stout wand of ash; whipping the flesh in ribbons from her writhing
bones. He startled even himself with these savageries--felt afraid
sometimes. Was his brain going? Had the stuff attacked his brain?

Once, meeting his smouldering eyes fixed avidly upon her during one of
these silent rages, Anne had put down the book and come over to him.

"I know how you're hating me," she said, crisp and practical as usual.
"But don't get scared over it. It's natural. This drug breeds murder.
Just you remember it's not _you_, but the morphine that hates me. Keep
that well in mind. _I_ do. Don't you worry about going crazy, and
suchlike. It takes years and years for morphine really to injure the
brain. It's your nerves that are yapping and yowling 'murder!'--your
brain's all right."

"I do hate you!" Chesney had said, with weak but dreadful intensity. "I
could give Cain points on murder. But there's a part of me that says
you're a damned good sort, all the same."

"Hate away," Anne replied serenely. "You're getting on
first-rate--that's all _I_ care about."

* * * * *

So it went, and Chesney slowly improved; now weaker, now stronger, as
the capricious drug sheathed its claws or gripped him tight again.

"Damnation! I'm like the frog in the well!" he would groan. "I crawl up
one foot and slip back two."

"No, you don't--not really," Anne assured him. "Up you're coming; slow,
maybe, but sure. A nice nurse I'd be to let you slip back two feet for
one!"

And she sniffed with her little blunt nose that reminded him of an
intelligent pug's.

The worst of it, the thing that aggravated him almost to frenzy at these
times, was that he still had morphia in his possession--a large supply
of that and cocaine, utterly unsuspected by Anne, for all her
shrewdness. He almost chuckled aloud sometimes as he lay watching her
during one of his black fits. His spirit did chuckle, as he thought how
he had outwitted even her, the little "Bush-Sleuth," in this matter. But
he did not dare to take an extra dose,