d the coffee together braced and calmed
him. He looked tolerably normal after he had had a tub and Gaynor had
shaved him.

"I'll put on a dressing-gown and sit in that armchair with a rug over
me," he said. One felt such a helpless carcass in bed when those brutes
of quacks came peering and asking their impudent questions.

Sophy felt encouraged when she saw him thus established in the big
chair. She had passed a wretched night. Her doubt of him--of the
genuineness of his attack--had seemed so shameful to her--yet she could
not help doubting. And if her doubt were justified--what abysms opened
before her--before them both! What salvation could there be for one so
deliberately, cunningly false?

"You look so much better," she said. "Perhaps this is the best thing for
you, really--the country--the perfect quiet of it."

"The brandy is what did this bit of improvement," he replied calmly. He
must brave it out. Besides, there was that only half-stilled craving
deep underneath the caution of his present mood. He added reasonably:
"You can't cut a chap off from a thing that he's as used to as I am to
spirit of some sort without making him suffer rather severely."

"It's only that the doctor said it was so bad for you, Cecil."

"Pf! That ass Hopkins! Now Bellamy has to bray his little bray. We'll
see what _he_ says."

Giles Bellamy came at ten o'clock He was a good-looking man of about
forty, with short-sighted, intelligent brown eyes that were rather too
large for a man, and a pale, clever face set in a Vandyke beard. This
beard and his large eyes, that looked almost womanishly soft at times,
had gained him the nickname of O. P. from Cecil (the initials of the
term "Old Portrait"). Sometimes he called him thus; sometimes, when in
an especially ironical mood, by the full title. He had known the
physician from boyhood.

"_Wie gehts_, Old Portrait?" he greeted him this morning from the
vantage of the easy chair. "The tender passion still unroused? When are
we to have some little new portraits for your family picture gallery?"

Bellamy took these pleasantries urbanely, though he was aware of a
certain savagery underneath them. He understood Chesney's character
fairly well, and felt rather sorry for him in his present predicament.
It was rather like seeing a trapped lion. Even though the lion had been
indulging in man-eating, he still felt compassion for the great, baffled
brute-force. His confirmed bachelorhood had alwa