ant to talk. He was
afraid of "giving himself away" somehow. So he asked Sophy to read aloud
because he did not want to be alone either. It would intensify that
sensation of blissful _bien etre_ which lay just ahead of him to have
some one near. This feeling was akin to that with which a child, cosily
in bed, regards its nurse sewing beside a shaded lamp.

Yes; he would go to bed, take the morphia, and then, later, the
salicylate of soda. Two days of it would knock out the sciatica, that
old doctor had said. Well--the morphia would keep him from being bored,
in addition to easing his pain. One was never bored while under the
effects of morphia. He would take one dose now, sleep off the bad
effects. Then, next day, take the other in the same way. The
third--well, it depended on how he would be feeling whether he took the
third dose or not.

Sophy sent Luigi to kindle a fire in his bedroom before she would let
him undress there. The _Mareng_, as the Scirocco is called on Lago
Maggiore, had been blowing all day. Now a fine drizzle had begun to
fall. As she went to find the book that Cecil had asked her to read
aloud, she thought of how odd it was that his illnesses should always be
associated in her mind with rainy weather. And the weather had been so
glorious nearly all the time, until now. Some splendid _Temporali_--the
crashing thunderstorms of that region--had come in July and August. But
there had been no steady, sullen rain such as was now falling.

As for Chesney, he congratulated himself on having this acute attack
just at this time. The _Mareng_, Luigi told him, would not last more
than two or three days. _The Wind-Flower_ was at Taroni's having her
bottom scraped for the races.

As soon as he was rid of this deuced pain, he would go and look up a
rowboat. He needed exercise. There were good boats, cheaper than
elsewhere, Amaldi had said, at a little village called Cerro, on the
other side of the Lake.

When Luigi had kindled the fire, he went up to his bedroom and closed
and locked the door. The blaze from dried roots and scraps of wood
looked very jolly tucked away in the corner like that. He glanced at the
fine strands of rain outside his window, and the soggy brown of the
balcony beyond, and thought the contrast only made the fire seem
jollier.

Then he took off his coat, spread a fresh towel on the bed, and laid out
the hypodermic syringe and one of the glass globules upon it. There was
one instant wh