the little parcel from her with something of sternness in
his face.

"Yes, Mrs. Carstairs. But what, exactly, is this thing?"

"An hypodermic syringe and a supply of morphia," she informed him
tranquilly. Then, as he pursed his lips into an involuntary whistle, she
went on, with more than a hint of mockery in her manner: "Oh, I came by
it quite honestly, I assure you! I didn't steal it from a doctor's
surgery--I bought it at a chemist's shop in London."

"You did?"

"Yes, and I made the young man show me how to use it." She smiled rather
ironically. "Naturally I was ignorant in the matter, and I didn't want
to make a blunder in its use."

"Really? Well, Mrs. Carstairs, this is your property, but I wish I might
persuade you to leave it in my keeping for the present."

"You think it would be safer there?" She looked at him as though
considering the matter. "Well, I wonder?"

"You wonder--what?" He spoke dryly.

"Whether it _is_ safer with you. Of course, as a doctor you can get
plenty of your own----"

"I shan't be tempted to steal yours for my private use," said Anstice a
trifle grimly; and the Fates who rule the lives of men probably smiled
to themselves over the fatuity of mankind.

"Well, I gave it to you myself, so you may as well keep it," said Chloe
indifferently, as though already tired of the subject; and without more
ado Anstice slipped the little white packet into his pocket, and took
leave of its former owner before she had opportunity to change her mind
on the subject.

He could not dismiss the figure of Chloe Carstairs from his thoughts as
he went about his day's work. Intuitively he knew that she was a
bitterly unhappy woman, that her life, like his own, had been rent in
two by a cataclysm of appalling magnitude, such as visits very few human
beings, and he told himself that this woman, too, had been down in the
depths even as he had been. And no man, no woman, who has once known the
blackness of the abyss, that "outer darkness" in which the soul sits
apart in a horror of loneliness, can ever view the world again with
quite the clear-eyed vision of the normal human being to whom,
fortunately for the sanity of the race, such appalling experiences are
mercifully unknown.

On a morning a week later Anstice received a note from Mrs. Carstairs.

"DEAR DR. ANSTICE,"

"My brother has unexpectedly written to offer himself for a couple
of nights, and I shall be pleased if you will c