shall wait here. You will call me if necessary?"

She did not ask him exactly what it was that he feared nor did he tell
her, but for the first time in many weeks they were able to look at each
other as comrades look. The eruption of the old trouble into the new
obscured the latter so that, for the time at least, the sick woman
behind the locked door held first place in both their thoughts.

It seemed to Esther that she waited a long time before the summons came.
Then she heard him call, "Esther!" It was a doctor's call, cool,
passionless, commanding. She flew up the stairs, closing Jane's door as
she hurried by. The door to her mother's room was open. It was brightly
lighted. The shade of the lamp had been removed and its garish yellow
fell full upon the bed and the strange figure which lay there.

Mary Coombe had apparently thrown herself down fully dressed--but in
what a costume! Surely no nightmare held anything more bizarre. Esther
had no time to notice details but she remembered afterwards how the feet
were clothed in different coloured stockings and that while one
displayed a gaily buckled slipper, the other was carefully laced into a
tan walking boot. Just now she could see nothing but the face, for the
greatest shock was there. It did not look like Mary's face at all--it
was strange, old, yellow and repulsive. Her unbrushed, lustreless hair
hung about it in a dull mat, one of her hands was clutched in it--the
hand was dirty.

A terrible thought struck every vestige of colour from Esther's cheek.
Her terrified gaze swept over the disordered room, up to the face of the
man who stood there so silently, then down again to the inert woman upon
the bed. Once, not long ago, she had seen a drunken man asleep upon the
roadside grass--like this.

"Is it--is it drink?" The words were a whisper of horror.

The doctor shook his head.

"I wish it were. I wish it were only that. Have you never heard of the
drug habit--morphia, opium? That is what we have to fight--and it is
what I feared."

"Oh!" It was a breath of relief. To Esther, who knew nothing of drugs,
or drug habits, the truth seemed less awful than the thing she
had imagined.

"Is--is it serious?" she asked timidly.

The doctor smiled grimly. "You will see. No need to frighten you now.
But it will be a fight from this on." He threw a light coverlet over the
helpless figure and replacing the shade on the lamp, turned down the
flaring wick. "I will tell y