* * * * *

Sophy went to Cecil, all her soul in arms for him, not against him; but
he met her with easy mockery. Would not admit it. Played with her. She
had tried to tyrannise--well, let her tyrannise, then.

"If you're so damned sure I've got the stuff, why don't you find it?" he
jeered. "Why didn't the little Bush-Sleuth unearth it? She's got the
nose of a Pytchley bitch--the baggage!"

The poison was at its ugly work again. In its deadening clasp,
kindliness and fellow-feeling lay numb; the sheer brute ramped free--the
strong, coarse, primal animal which morphia rouses, at first merely to a
savage irritation but later informs with more than ape-like cunning,
with a callous cruelty lower than the brute's because moved by more than
the brute's intelligence.

And within a week from his first lapse the change in Chesney had become
alarming. Something was here that Bellamy could not understand. Dilated
pupils and violent rages, as in London. A sort of false vigour that sent
him roaming about the house at times--haranguing in his brilliant,
bitter way--insolent, vituperative, insupportable. Sick with
humiliation, Sophy told the physician of what Dr. Carfew had said: that
Chesney alternated the morphia with cocaine.

So strange and wild were his brother's moods that Gerald had to be taken
into confidence. Even Lady Wychcote agreed that Bellamy should wire to
London for a man-nurse; but she held out implacably against all idea of
committing Cecil against his will to a sanatorium.

"It's a phase," she kept saying. "It's a phase. When Nurse Harding comes
back, she will know what to do."

And all the while it rained, ever rained--now lightly, now whelmingly.
The climate was like a vast Melancholia wrapping England as in sickness.

Search was made everywhere for the concealed drugs. Sophy lay awake at
night, racking her brain for possible solutions, until it haunted her
dreams like a dark rebus, cluttering her only half-unconscious brain
with the refuse of rejected theories.

The man-nurse came. When he entered Chesney's room, he was flung out so
violently by the enraged giant (Chesney stood six-foot-four in his
socks) that he barely missed having his arm broken against the opposite
wall.

The man, white with wrath and pain, went straight to the library where
the family had gathered about Bellamy, apprehensive and anxious as to
the nurse's reception. He had chosen himself to go alone. He told