me. One night the old doctor had
come into the room very drunk. He was crying and moaning in a maudlin
fashion about some mysterious position which he had lost, and he had sat
on the bed and, cursed his passion for strong drink with such vehemence
that she, in her half-dazed state of mind, had found herself interested
against her will.

In one of her lucid intervals she had realised a vital fact, that she
was under the influence of a drug, and instinctively knew that she was
becoming more and more immune to its action. She formed a vague plan,
which she had almost forgotten the next morning. She must always be
sleepy, almost dazed; she must never show signs of returning
consciousness. She had been a week in the "nursing home" before she made
this plan. She could lie now with her eyes shut, picking up the threads.
She heard somebody talk of a ship and of a passport, and learned that
she was to be removed in another week. She could not find where, but it
was somewhere on a ship. She tried once, when the nurses were out of the
room, to get out of bed and walk to the window. Her legs gave way
beneath her, and it was with the greatest difficulty that she managed to
crawl back to bed.

There was no escape that way. There was no help either from the nurses
who were not nurses at all, nor from the maudlin little doctor, nor from
the pretty girl who came sometimes and looked down on her with
undisguised contempt--or was it pity? Then one night she woke in a
fright. Two people were talking. She half turned her head and saw that
Pinto was in the room, and his face was a flaming fury. She had seen
that look before, but now his rage was directed at somebody else, and
with a start she recognised the pretty girl that the nurses called
Lollie.

"You're not in this, Lollie," said the man, and she laughed.

"That's just where you're wrong, Silva," she replied. "I'm very much in
it. What happens to this girl when she leaves here heaven only knows--I
guess it's up to the colonel. But while she's here I'm looking after
her."

"You are, are you?" he said between his teeth. "Well, now you can go and
take a walk."

"I can also take a seat too," she said.

He walked over to her and glowered down at the girl, and she puffed a
cloud of cigarette smoke in his face.

"I'm a crook because it pays me to be a crook," said the girl calmly.
"If it's jollying along one of the colonel's blue-eyed innocents, or
keeping a watchful eye upon Mr. Ki