uddenly came to his feet, and said: "Voila, I will go
to my wife." And catching up his cap, and forgetting his overcoat, he
trotted away home in a fright.

What Medallion did or said to Secord that night neither ever told. But
it must have been a singular scene, for when the humourist pleads or
prays there is no pathos like it; and certainly Medallion's eyes were
red when he rapped up the Little Chemist at dawn, caught him by the
shoulders, turned him round several times, thumped him on the back, and
called him a bully old boy; and then, seeing the old wife in her quaint
padded night-gown, suddenly hugged her, threw himself into a chair, and
almost shouted for a cup of coffee.

At the same time Mrs. Secord was alternately crying and laughing in her
husband's arms, and he was saying to her: "I'll make a fight for it,
Lesley, a big fight; but you must be patient, for I expect I'll be a
devil sometimes without it. Why, I've eaten a drachm a day of the stuff,
or drunk its equivalent in the tincture. No, never mind praying; be a
brick and fight with me that's the game, my girl."

He did make a fight for it, such an one as few men have made and come
out safely. For those who dwell in the Pit never suffer as do they who
struggle with this appetite. He was too wise to give it up all at once.
He diminished the dose gradually, but still very perceptibly. As it was,
it made a marked change in him. The necessary effort of the will gave
a kind of hard coldness to his face, and he used to walk his garden for
hours at night in conflict with his enemy. His nerves were uncertain,
but, strange to say, when (it was not often) any serious case of illness
came under his hands, he was somehow able to pull himself together and
do his task gallantly enough. But he had had no important surgical case
since he began his cure. In his heart he lived in fear of one; for he
was not quite sure of himself. In spite of effort to the contrary he
became irritable, and his old pleasant fantasies changed to gloomy and
bizarre imaginings.

The wife never knew what it cost her husband thus, day by day, to take a
foe by the throat and hold him in check. She did not guess that he knew
if he dropped back even once he could not regain himself: this was his
idiosyncrasy. He did not find her a great help to him in his trouble.
She was affectionate, but she had not much penetration even where he
was concerned, and she did not grasp how much was at stake. She thou