e timidly at his immense, angry
customer.

"_Prego, Signore_--but not at all," he said. "We will sell it to you.
This is a good prescription--good firms have filled it before. It is
only that we have not the morphia in tablets--but in solution. And we
have it not with the atropia."

"Ah!" said Chesney. His face relaxed. "Well, show me the kind you have,"
he said curtly, but not uncivilly.

The clerk brought a little cardboard box divided into cells. These
cells, which were lined with cotton-wool, each held a small glass
globule filled with a solution of morphia and sealed at one end with
wax.

"It is safer so, Signore. One escapes to infect oneself. One breaks the
seal and fills the hypodermic _siringa_ direct from these little
globules."

Chesney was silent for a second, gazing at the little transparent
amphorae that held Nepenthe. Then he said:

"Do you keep hypodermic syringes? I have broken mine."

He winced as the unnecessary lie escaped him. It made things more
plausible, but need not have been uttered. Untruth seemed somehow the
inevitable attendant of morphia, even when innocently indulged in as he
was now about to do. Yet all this time his pulse was racing. The clang
of the little bell attached to the door of the pharmacy, that rang when
customers went in or out, made him start and glance round each time that
it sounded....

He went out and got again into the _carrozzella_. In his pocket were
three of the little globules and a shining new hypodermic syringe in a
black Morocco case.

"Villa Bianca!" he said.

The vetturino glanced up, struck by the new, firm ring in his voice.

"They must have given him some devil of a good medicine in there," he
thought. "He's another man, _per Bacco_!"

This time the patient screw shambled on to the gates of Villa Bianca
without check.

XXXVIII

He was very cautious about this dose of morphia. He felt that he must
guard in every possible way against the nausea that might follow it,
thus taken without atropine. Sophy was pleased and surprised to hear
that he had seen Camenis, and still more surprised when he said that he
was going to bed at once, and would she be a dear girl and read aloud to
him. He was looking forward with a half-shamed excitement to the luxury
of relief and stimulation which he knew the morphia, so long refrained
from, would give him to a superlative degree. But he knew also that it
would be apt to make him garrulous. He did not w