aper I'll just unroll one of these and do it over."

Sophy handed her the little packet of rice-paper, and gave her a lacquer
pen-tray in which to put the loose tobacco. Anne's deft fingers made
quick work of one of the big rolls. She whipped off its white sheath,
and began shredding the packed tobacco neatly. All at once she gave a
cry. She sat staring down at the tray as though it had turned into a
Gorgon's head.

"What is it?" asked Sophy, startled.

The girl made a clutch at her, dragging her nearer, without taking her
eyes from the loose tobacco in the tray.

"Look, Mrs. Chesney! _Look!_" she cried, her voice a low tremolo of
excitement. She touched something in the tray with the tip of her
finger-nail. It was a little white object, round, flat ... indeed, there
were several of them--some tangled among the tobacco, some having
dropped clear on the dark surface of the lacquer.

Sophy stared. The truth didn't dawn on her.

"Were they in the _cigarette_?" she asked. "_What_ are they?"

Then Anne, overwrought with sleeplessness and excitement, so far forgot
herself that, setting the tray on the table, she seized the tall lady in
her arms and hugged her wildly.

"What are they? Morphia!... Morphia!... Morphia!" she chanted, as she
hugged Sophy to her in little jerks that accompanied each cry of
"Morphia!"

"Morphia ... and cocaine, probably, Mrs. Chesney! Oh, the clever devil!
The clever, clever devil!"

* * * * *

This secreting of tablets of morphia and cocaine in the big cigarettes
had been the employment of Chesney during those hours behind locked
doors before leaving London. With a pair of very long, slender forceps,
he had pulled out part of the tobacco, dropped the tablets into the
hollow thus made, and repacked the tobacco cunningly upon them. Hours
and hours he had spent thus, making tiny marks on the cigarettes which
contained the different drugs, that he might know them apart. Certain
cigarettes he left intact. He mixed these and the doctored ones in the
boxes, large tin cases made for importation, which he sealed up again
cleverly, with a tiny strip of paper on the same tone as the wrapper.

The morphinomaniac's imagination works in spurts. First come jets of
cerebral luminosity; then gaps of a grey vagueness. Cecil's constructive
fancy had not worked beyond the point of laying in a large supply of the
drug. He had not considered how he would procure more when it