liar odour of the cigarettes. Dr. Bream always made his round
in the morning, and the men nurses he employed to take care of his
patients either did not notice anything unusual, or supposed that
Logotheti smoked some 'outlandish Turkish stuff,' and, because he was
a privileged person, they said nothing about it. As he had brought
the patient to the establishment to be cured, it was really not to be
supposed that he would supply him with forbidden narcotics.

Now, to a man who is poisoned with drink and is suddenly deprived of
it, opium is from the beginning as delightful as it is nauseous to
most healthy people when they first taste it; and during the next four
or five days, while Feist appeared to be improving faster than might
have been expected, he was in reality acquiring such a craving for
his daily dose of smoke that it would soon be acute suffering to be
deprived of it; and this was what Logotheti wished. He would have
supplied him with brandy if he had not been sure that the contraband
would be discovered and stopped by the doctor; but opium, in the
hands of one who knows exactly how it is used, is very much harder
to detect, unless the doctor sees the smoker when he is under the
influence of the drug, while the pupils of the eye are unnaturally
contracted and the face is relaxed in that expression of beatitude
which only the great narcotics can produce--the state which Baudelaire
called the Artificial Paradise.

During these daily visits Logotheti became very confidential; that is
to say, he exercised all his ingenuity in the attempt to make Feist
talk about himself. But he was not very successful. Broken as the man
was, his characteristic reticence was scarcely at all relaxed, and it
was quite impossible to get beyond the barrier. One day Logotheti gave
him a cigarette more than usual, as an experiment, but he went to
sleep almost immediately, sitting up in his chair. The opium, as a
moderate substitute for liquor, temporarily restored the habitual tone
of his system and revived his natural self-control, and Logotheti soon
gave up the idea of extracting any secret from him in a moment of
garrulous expansion.

There was the other way, which was now prepared, and the Greek had
learned enough about his victim to justify him in using it. The cypher
expert, who had been at work on Feist's diary, had now completed his
key and brought Logotheti the translation. He was a rather shabby
little man, a penman employed